


Lost Souls

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-11
Updated: 2006-01-15
Packaged: 2019-01-19 11:43:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12409677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: [Complete!] "Sometimes, he wishes she could remember."  (Brand new chapter i didn't post on ff.net chs 5 and 7 Ch.10 heavily redone)





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

**Disclaimer: Everything from HP books belongs to JK Rowling**

**_ Lost Souls _ **

Prologue

It is early in the evening and the sun sets on the horizon as he watches from a restaurant balcony. It is a quaint French place in the middle of London with beautiful music and charms to present a French scenery in the background. It’s a beautiful restaurant, a place he went to a lot when he was young and fresh out of Hogwarts that seemed to loose its charm as age took its toll. Seemed to loose its charm as life played its twisted and painful game with his soul.

With him is a beautiful girl with strawberry blond hair and pale green eyes. He looks at her a lot, the young girl sitting across from him. Her eyes are alive with innocence and she seems like a child to him, a mere child taken in by promises of love, of forever. She seems so naÃ¯ve, so ready to believe what she wants to think is the truth. So ready to put her faith into him. He smiles as she ecstatically rants to him about the beauty of the restaurant, about the ambiance she never felt anywhere else. He smiles as he watches her face glow with raw happiness, with untainted innocence. He loves it, loves seeing her smile as if he gave her the world. Loves knowing that not everyone in his life has a dark cloud hanging over their head. He needs this now. _Happiness_ , he decided, _is hard to come by_.

Violin players congregate near their table and as the stars rise in the sky he offers his hand. She stares at it lovingly and puts her small, pale hand inside his and they walk out to the dance floor floating a few feet above ground. He feels free. Feels as if he’s on cloud nine or floating in the heavens with an angel in his arms. She dances very graceful and feels light as he holds her, feels so delicate he’s scared to hold her too tight and yet can’t stop himself from bringing her closer. So, he wraps his arms around her tighter and pulls her into him as her head rests pleasantly on his shoulder.

She sighs into his muscular chest. _This is it_ , she thinks over and over again. _This is what love is about_. She whispers into his ear, words of love, of adoration.

“ _Oh James,”� she coos, “It’s so beautiful.”�_

“ _Oh James,”� she whispers, “I wish I could be here forever.”�_

Sometimes he wishes he had answers to her proclamations of love. Sometimes he wishes that he could say to her, say that he loves her, that he wishes he could be here forever because where he came from no longer holds the beauty he longs for. That where he came from leaves him empty and dying inside. Sometimes he wishes he could hold her all night or that he was able to look into her eyes and kiss her without the stench of sin, of guilt eating away at him. He wishes he could love her because, more than anything, he wishes for their time together to be more than a short dream he uses to escape the reality of life. He wishes for a fulfillment the beautiful child in front of him could never give him.

Instead, he whispers charming words into her ear, whispers French romance quotes or Spanish pick up lines for a quick laugh. Instead, he listens for her musical laughter as she hears his jokes, waits for the exact moment her eyes light up and resemble emeralds. Emeralds, his favorite jewel, favorite color. But as he stares into her watered-down green eyes, he pushes thoughts of emeralds out of his mind. He pushes away thoughts of fiery red rubies and beautiful porcelain dolls and focuses on the girl in front of him. This child of twenty years, who still lives with her heart and soul, still thinks anything is possible. And it’s her innocence, her naÃ¯ve appearance, that endeared her and keeps him coming back for more. He thrives off her purity, tries to absorb as much of her light as possible.

They dance in the starlight mesmerized by each other, by the music, until the waiter comes to their table with the food. He watches her eat, the small bites she takes and the refined manners she was taught at a young age. She looks like the perfect society girl and he wonders, who is it that she reminds him of? And its then that images of a day many years ago fill his mind. He’s dancing in the moonlight with a feisty girl who stole his heart long ago. A beautiful girl that has been haunting him for years, creating a void in his already hard heart. Her hair is bright and her eyes glow even brighter and she just seems to him to be the essence of beauty. They laugh all night and never once look away from each others eyes. She touches his face and lightly kisses his lips as she whispers that she loves him. He looks deeply into her eyes as he replies that he loves her too, loves her so much.

He snaps out of his reverie and feels his heart ache as he looks at the girl in front of him. He realizes that she reminds him of the beauty of his dreams, reminds him of an innocence he once knew, a passion he longs to remember. He looks at her and sees a shadow of another woman, a shadow of his heart. They all remind him of her. Every girl he takes out is a shadow of her bold beauty. Every girl is a pawn he uses to satisfy a fantasy that should have become reality long ago.

He shakes his head from thinking of her and falls into conversation with his date. They speak about trivial things, about the latest fashion in Europe, about the latest product zonko came up with or the last quidditch game. And secretly these topics bore him. Secretly, he wishes to discuss politics and books he has read. Secretly he wishes to tell his latest story about auror duty, about the horrors he has to get off his chest. But instead, he smiles charmingly as she gabs about her latest venture into Diagon Alley. He smiles even as he realizes she has no thoughts of her own, as he realizes he yearns for a quick wit this girl could never measure up to.

Two hours later they walk into a nice looking motel. As she opens the room door he hungrily snatches her to him and kisses her with abrupt passion. Her arms immediately wrap around his neck and she shudders as he sucks the weak spot on her neck. He kicks the door shut and she begins to unbutton his shirt as he leads her over to the bed. His shirt comes off quickly and as she lies underneath him he pulls her tight, black dress off her small body and climbs more on the bed as she undoes his belt.

They begin kissing again and suddenly passion explodes inside of him. His body moves perfectly with hers and her pale skin seems to glow in the candlelight. He has her again and again as lust rages inside of her, of them both, and their sweaty bodies mingle together on the cheap motel bed. Two hours later she falls asleep in his arms and as he watches her slow breaths insomnia consumes him. Her light hair falls over the sheets covering her naked body and he realizes how young she looks as she sleeps. How young she seems when he compares her to himself. Sometimes it's enough to deter him, to make him stay away for days at a time because it feels too wrong to continue. But then he'll look into saddened emerald eyes and only seconds after he'll owl this girl who is no more than a child because he needs this. He needs this diversion from reality.

Slowly he gets out of bed so he doesn’t wake her and begins to dress. _It’s late_ , he thinks as he look at his watch, _it’s time to go home_. He kisses her forehead before he leaves and when he hears her whimper in her sleep he lightly kisses her lips and writes a note promising to see her soon, promising to call on her in the next few days. And silently he leaves the hotel room, walks to the nearest fire place, and goes home.

When he arrives the house is dark and eerie. Quietly, he puts his hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a fine, gold ring and slips it on his ring finger. He walks up the stairs, never making a noise as his body becomes consumed in shadows, and slowly opens the door to his bedroom. He looks over to the bed where his wife sleeps. She’s still beautiful, as beautiful as she was the day he met her and his heart lurches as he looks at her rich red curls flowing beautifully over the side of the bed. He looks at her sleeping peacefully and realizes, with the same agony he does every night, that she never looks as happy awake than she does in sleep, never as peaceful, not like she used to. And he realizes, again, that he's tired of her depression, of this void growing inside his heart. He's tired of the rift that has grown between them. Tired of the sadness that has consumed them. But he doesn’t try to remember happier times, doesn’t try to dwell on this love that makes him want to cry, _to die_ , and instead walks to his closet and puts on his pajamas without turning on a light. He climbs into bed after brushing his teeth and pulls the covers up to his shoulders. She moves a bit as the mattress’s weight shifts under their bodies and he observes how she no longer moves closer to be wrapped inside his arms. How she no longer opens her eyes to get a quick kiss before he falls asleep. He stares at the ceiling for a while. He listens to her breathing and remembers a few years ago when her eyes glowed with life and her laugh was true instead of the sarcastic sound she’s adopted. He thinks about the past, about their fights in school and dates in Hogsmeade. He thinks about their life a few years ago when everything felt perfect, when life seemed to finally make sense. He falls into a fitful sleep after an hour of reminiscing and dreams of the past, of the future he was supposed to have.

**A/N: If you didn’t know this is a Lily/ James. It’s a slight Alternate Universe and will be a few chapters long. Ok, so how many of you hate James right now? I mean cheating on Lily! Men! I hope you like this. I know it seems vague but everything will be described in the few next chapters or so and you’ll realize how a love as strong as theirs can suffer so horribly.**

Bye for now **REVIEW!**


	2. Emptiness

**A/N: If you’re rereading this from before I would just like to say there will be some chapter I’m completely rewriting (mainly the ones later one) because I completely despise how they came out. So don’t not read it because you already have. I’m think about adding a chapter because as I was reading through it I realized it’s all James and you hardly know Lily’s thoughts. How would it seem if I added something on that?**

 

He wakes up to a predominantly sunny morning lying on his navy bed covers. His head is aching and his eyes shut closed before adjusting to the bright sunlight leaking through the window. He turns over slightly in order to see if she was still there, in order to see if she still waited in bed for him like before. It’s not as if he expected her to be there or even craved it, but as he turned on his side and saw that her side of the bed was empty his stomach lurched and his eyes whipped shut. Waking up alone never gets any easier.

He puts on his suit quietly as he listens to the coffee pot boiling down stairs. He takes his time getting ready, doesn’t leave until his image in the mirror is impeccable. Doesn’t leave until he can no longer prolong going downstairs and seeing… seeing her. He knots his tie so meticulously, buttons his shirt with the utmost care, and only after there’s nothing left to do, no other task to complete does he forfeit and leave the comforts of his walk-in closet. With a deep breath he walks out of the room, teeth brushed, hair sticking up in all directions.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table reading the Daily Prophet. She looks up when he enters and offers him a small, casual smile before looking back down at her article. He surveys her in the morning a lot. Her face is still very pale and nothing about her glows like it used to. It’s as if she is just a shadow of the former beauty she once was. A shadow of the life she once had inside of her. He surveys her now, surveys her soft red hair and her now dull green eyes. He remembers sparkles, remembers fire and passion, and he closes his eyes as he stands there because remembering her before, before when they were happy and in love, is the only way he can survive through the day. The only way he knows how to live.

“James?”� a sweet voice calls. “James, are you okay?”� and her manner seems caring but the tone was so impersonal that he fancies she just asked him about the weather. Her voice no longer holds that regal beauty he once craved. He sometimes thinks she’s become a stranger to him. Gone is the girl who would quarrel with him in the Hogwarts hallways. Gone is the girl with the sparkle in her beautiful eyes. Gone is the girl who would look at him with a bright smile and tell him she loves him. Gone is the girl who spoke about their future and knew it would be magical.

His eyes shoot open and he looks over at her staring at him in concern. For a second he thinks about telling her the truth. About saying no, **NO!** Nothing has been okay since… since… he falters and sits down. There’s no point in telling her the truth, in hurting them both with the words he wishes to speak and the thoughts that never leave his mind.

“I’m okay. I just got lost in my thoughts.”� He says smiling patronizingly as he looks at his wife of seven years. His beautiful wife lost in a world of melancholy she would never allow him to share.

“Um, are you going to eat breakfast?”� she says still looking down at the paper as he goes and gets some coffee.

“Yes, yes I am.”�

“Can you… Do you think you could eat the dinner left over from last night? I made a meat loaf and then you worked late so we have a lot left over.”� She says quietly looking at him in her usual placid manner.

He feels hot suddenly remembering where he was last night and mumbles slightly, “I know. I’m sorry.”�

She looks up at him suddenly, “Will you be home tonight?”� She asks and he wonders, wonders if she wants him there, if she misses him when he is not around, because more than anything he misses her when she isn’t with him, near him. Misses her with every fiber of his being because without Lily Evans Potter he knows he has nothing else to live for, to fight for. Without her he may as well be dead and it doesn’t matter if she’s become a shell of a person because that need will never go away.

He smiles, not politely or cordially or anything, but a big smile. The smile of promise, of a love aching to return.

“Yes,”� he says, “I’ll be home.”� He replies still staring into her eyes.

“Good. You know how I hate to waste food.”� And she looks down again. He starts to eat his breakfast in silence and feels rather angry, rather upset that all she cares about is spoiling food. Wasn’t it only three years ago when laughter surrounded him at breakfast? Three years ago when her porcelain skin radiated with life and her eyes glistened like emeralds? He hardly takes a bite before he rises from his seat again. He never stays in her presence long anymore. It too painful, too heartbreaking.

“Well, I’m going to go. I’ll see you for dinner ok?”� He says quietly standing up from the table.

“Yes.”� She says hardly paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth so intent she seems on reading the paper in front of her. The paper whose page hasn’t been turned once since he arrived at breakfast.

He walks over to where she sits and gives her the usual light kiss on the cheek. But, suddenly, he kneels down on the floor next to her chair.

“Lily?”� He asks quietly. She turns to him, turns her numb green eyes to his face. _Her once brilliant eyes_ , he thinks. And he leans up and kisses her softly on the mouth. Kisses those soft pink lips because nothing else in the world can give him more satisfaction than that, than her. Almost instantly, she pulls away and turns from him. Pulls away so fast a person could have thought she was burned, was cursed instead of kissed by the man she promised eternal love to. Her breath is slightly faster, but she calmly moves her body away from him. He feels cold suddenly, feels empty.

“You’re going to be late.”� She says before resuming reading the newspaper.

“Bye.”� He says to her but she’s too immersed in the paper to even hear him speak.

At work his mood doesn’t brighten as he goes over file after file of known and suspected death eaters. He doesn’t understand how one event, one thing, could change his life, _him_ , so completely. Depression is like a sickness, he often thinks. It’s a virus that eats away at any person who gets in its way and devours its victims without mercy. It kills with the satisfaction of draining a person’s very soul out of their bodies, their very hearts.

He looks around his office as tears start to come to his eyes. He opens his draw then, takes out a picture of a very pretty girl with hair as black as his own. He closes his eyes and the tears silently fall down his face. She’s a torment for him, the very being inflicting the burning pain of sorrow. She’s the very pain of knowing that a future, a life could one moment be so bright and the next plunged into darkness.

He cries silent tears before putting the picture back into the draw and locking it shut. He looks around his desk, at the various pictures sitting there. There’s one of him and the Marauders out by the lake at Hogwarts. They’re all laughing, so young and naÃ¯ve. They’re all so ready to believe in the easy path to happiness that never existed. He looks at the frame next to that one. It’s a picture of him and Lily taken soon after their honeymoon. She stands in front of him smiling ecstatically and his arms are wrapped around her and his hands, hers too, are place on her stomach. He wipes his eyes and angrily picks up that photograph and throws it at the wall. The frame smashes into tiny pieces.

He takes out a piece of quill and parchment to write Lily a short note, a regretful note saying he won’t be able to make it to dinner. _What’s the point_ , he thinks, _in trying to please her when the only way to do that is to make yourself scarce?_ _What’s the point in holding onto something that will never return?_

Love, it’s a feeling that’s ruled his life since he was sixteen years old and first realized he loved her. It’s been his gift, his curse, to control his life until the day he dies. He can’t do it, can’t love her like he used to because of this barrier she put between them. He can’t stay true to a wife who couldn’t even shed a tear if he suddenly died. And it’s painful. Painful because they once had a relationship many dream of. They were once Hogwarts most promising couple. She once hated not to have him at her side, hated any second of the day when she had to live and breathe without James Potter because he was her everything. It died, though. It died so quickly, so suddenly, that sometimes he can pretend they’re like they used to be. Pretend they’re still the golden couple more in love that any one else in this world. But it isn’t real and never will be again.

It’s why he goes for girls like Melissa, the one from last night. They remind him of her. Remind him of her vivacity, of her innocence that has long since been extinguished. And it’s the only way he can make love to them. Because they remind him of his lover, of Lily Evans before she reverted into herself. Before her spirit died.

It’s no excuse, cheating on a lawful wedded wife because she no longer cares for him. But it doesn’t matter, doesn’t faze him because the person he married no longer exists and the person she promised eternal fidelity to has died as well. Being true to each other no longer means anything because there’s no person, no relationship to remain true to. And deep inside he knows that. Deep inside she knows that, too.

Sirius comes into his office for his lunch break with take out food. They snack for an hour on Chinese chicken and won ton soup laughing about old times and the strange people Sirius comes into contact with as a publicist for the qudditch league. It’s the one part of the day he looks forward to. The one part of the day where his sadness is forgotten and he can breathe easily because his heart feels light and his brain care free.

Sirius understands him. He knows about his clandestine affairs, knows about his wife that shut the world out, and realizes that numbing the pain is that only way he can help. It is the reason why he doesn’t berate his friend on his adulterous life. Why he doesn’t tell James about his love for Lily because she’s the sister he never had. To sympathize with Lily would forsake James and James, he could never turn his back on him because James was there every step of the way, He took him in when he was a poor orphan with no value in this world. Gave him hope when it was no where to be found. So he pretends to not know about the affairs and James, in return, doesn’t speak about them, never once mentions them. Instead they feign happiness, pretend that life, the world, hasn’t changed since Hogwarts.

At nine o’clock he heads home. He neatly puts his files away and takes his coat from the rack putting it over his shoulders. He leaves his office with a heavy heart, leaves the only place that can give him sanctuary. He stops at the door before leaving and picks up the picture he carelessly tossed on the ground. He stares at her, stares at her smile beaming at him, stares at the young faces mocking him. He places it on his desk and walks out the door and heads home.

It’s a dreary night outside and rain is slightly drizzling on him as he strolls home. He almost stops at a bar two blocks from his house. Almost drowns his sorrows in vodka and fire whiskey, but fights the temptation and goes home to where his wife is waiting.

The house is dark when he walks in save for the fire burning in the living room. He enters the house, walks into the living room and sees red hair spilling over the arm of the couch. He walks over to where she lays an hears her soft breaths, sees her arm that fell over the couch’s edge. He leans down in front of her, smells the stench of rum on her breath and sees the half empty bottle on the coffee table behind him. She’s been drinking again.

He breaths deeply and spots a purple photo album locked between her arms. Slowly so he doesn’t wake her, he pries the velvety album from her weak hand. On the cover is written in exquisite, golden cursive **Gabriella Elise Potter.** He puts the book down on the table next to the bottle and picks Lily up from her spot on the couch. He carries her up the stairs and into their bedroom where he places her on the bed. He looks at her then, brushes her hair from her eyes, wipes away the tears that dried on her face. He takes her hand and kisses it by her knuckles.

“Sweet dreams, darling.”� He says before going down stairs.

He walks over to the couch and picks up the photo album from the table. With his hands shaking he opens the cover and the book reveals pictures of a beautiful child with midnight black hair just like his own and green eyes even brighter than those of her mother. It’s the same girl he saw earlier that day. The same girl in that picture hidden deep within his desk. He turns the pages slowly, watching her grow from a baby into the beautiful three year old she became. Watching her grow into a witty child with arrogance already forming in her pretty eyes. He puts his head inside his hands and cries slightly as he remembers holding her after she was born, as he remembers playing with her in the nursery. He remembers the feeling of completion that slowly abandoned him throughout the years. He closes his eyes and tears begin to leak out stronger than before. It will never become easier. Losing a child is something that will haunt a parent into their grave.

**A/N: I hope this chapter is to your liking. I know it doesn’t explain much but I wanted you to see the void they live with and the pain each of them feel. Yes, Gabriella is Lily and James’s daughter. And I know it’s not cannon but I wanted to do something different. I hope you like the story. REVEW!**


	3. Divorce

** Divorce **

He wakes up early the next morning. He deals with the usual realization that he has to endure yet another day as the sleep subsides and he begins to fully awake. Beside him Lily is still asleep breathing peacefully on the side of her pillow as if she never took a sip of alcohol. As if she never tried to drown her sorrows in that mind altering substance. He gets out of bed quickly and walks downstairs to the kitchen in his pajamas. Once there, he puts a pot of water in the coffee maker and starts to make eggs as he charms some bread to toast and butter itself. It takes a few minutes for the coffee to finish and when it does he pours it into a mug adding two sugars and a dash of cream. He smiles as he remembers her saying how she _only_ likes a dash. Not a bit or a spoonful but a dash.

He isn’t sure how to describe it, not even to himself, because his connection with her has become so awry. She’s his wife, has been since he was nineteen years old and he knows that deep within himself he loves her. That deep within himself he’s waiting to break free of the mental constraints he placed on himself. He’s waiting for her to break free as well. But now, it’s like they’re stuck in some limbo, some desert void of the emotions a person needs to be classified as human. Stuck in a desert a pain he can’t seem to find his way out of no matter how hard he tries. How can someone love anyone lacking in all feelings? Love someone who can hardly even love themselves? It’s the reason for the rift between them. Both are lost in a sea of pain not wanting to break free. Not wanting to ask for help from the one person who can save them because the mere remembrance of their love, the mere touch of a hand, brings back memories of a loss neither can ever forget. It’s the reason for her coldness and his depression. Whenever she looks at his face she is reminded of her daughter that died such a short time ago. Whenever he sees her, sees her dull eyes and aloof expression, all he can think of is his wonderful Gabriella. His beautiful and charming daughter he would do anything to get back.

He places the food on a tray and carries it up the stairs humming quietly to himself. She stirs in her sleep as he enters the room and he places the tray of food next to her on the night stand. He watches her before waking her. Watches her before the lines come back to his face and before her depression becomes evident because its moment like these, moments when life isn’t tormenting her that he can pretend the past three years never happened. He can pretend their nineteen years old and in love. He can pretend that life didn’t destroy the one thing he needs to survive. It’s moments like these, when she is blissfully unconscious, that he cherishes above all else because its the only time she's free. After a few moments he strokes her hair and gently moves his hand over her soft skin until her eyes flutter open. He smiles,

“Good morning, Lily.”� He says quietly as she looks at him startled. Tears form in her eyes as it does every time she wakes up after a night of drinking. She hates how weak she is. She hates how she can’t help but let her despair get the better of her.

“I’m so sorry, James. I’m so…”� but she falters and turns away as a solitary tear falls down her face.

“There’s nothing to apologize about, honey. We all…”� but he stops.

“I hate how you care for me like a child.”� She says resentfully as he places the tray before her. “I hate it, James. I hate it.”�

He doesn’t though. He can’t hate taking care of her because her well-being means more to him than his own. He can’t hate taking care of her because there’s that dream that one day she’ll wake up from this eternal sleep, wake up and realize that life can go on after death, that shunning those she loves isn’t the way to live.

“I don’t mind, Lily. Its part of the job description right, in sickness or in health?”� he says jokingly and smiles at her.

She flinches as he says that. “I’m not sick.”� She says like a child who’s about to be scolded and closes her eyes as if to take the memory of their wedding day out of her mind. It’s one of those moments she would forget if she could.

“Yes you are, Lily. This is becoming too frequent. You can’t keep hurting yourself like this.”� He says to her quietly taking her hand. She snatches it away.

“I don’t care James.”� She says her weak voice just above a whisper. “I don’t care if it hurts me because my joy is gone.”� Tears start leaking out of her eyes. “My joy has died.”� He sits on the edge of the bed and wraps his arms around her. It surprises him that she leans into his chest.

“I hurt too, Lily. You aren’t the only one who lost her you know. We both did and we both suffer because it.”� He says sternly in her red hair feeling like he’s talking to a child. She stays silent.

“You have to stop drinking like this, Lily. I don’t care that you don’t care if you live or die. I don’t care if you look around at your life and see nothing worth living for. Because I need you to stay alive. I need you to be healthy.”� He forcibly says his eyes becoming watery.

He stares into her eyes and she looks back at him with a blank expression. He squeezes her hands, lightly at first and than tighter and tighter hoping for a response, but all she does is turn away from him and take a sip of her coffee.

“Lily… Red.”� He says desperately using his old nickname for her desiring more than anything a reaction from her listless demeanor, desiring a smile, a small kiss on the cheek. Desiring even a dark scowl and words of anger because even her temper is better than this. He hates it, hates how she gave up. And he knows he isn’t any better. He knows he gave up on the many principles she now knows are false, but seeing her thus is unbearable for him. He can’t take her emptiness and indifference anymore and all he wants to do is make her happy again. All he wants to do is make her live again. _Is that love_ , he thinks. _Is love this want, the need for her happiness because her pain affects me so deeply?_

“James, please, stop pretending that things haven’t changed. I’m tired of you acting as if… as if we’re still seventeen! As if we’re about to graduate from school.”� She says angrily after a few moments.

“Lily, I care about you. Why do you always get so mad when I say that?”�

“Why do you keep trying to recapture something that isn’t there anymore? Why do you insist on… on tormenting me with these memories I just want to forget?”� She says crying through her anger, her voice louder than normal.

“What is it you want from me, Lily? To leave you? To give you a divorce? Is that what you want?”� He asks her in a threatening, desperate whisper. It was the first time either of them spoke on the subject of divorce.

She stays silent and after a few moments she watches him leave, her spirit defeated as usual. _A divorce_ , she thinks. The thought has crossed her mind, the thought of parting with him because of these dreadful memories his mere presence brings back to her. The thought crossed her mind as she sat in Gabriella’s room one day, the bed still made because it is the shrine she kept of her lost daughter, and she realized she could never move on from this disappointment and that she was holding him back from a happy existence he could have elsewhere. She’s holding herself back as well. But every time she thinks about it, about packing her bags and trying to move on with her life she gets a throbbing pain in her chest and falls to the floor in a quick swoop. She can’t imagine it. She can’t imagine a life when he isn’t there because, because he’s James, her childhood love, her dream for the future that has long since died out. He’s James, the man she once loved so much it hurt, the man she would have died for, killed for, to ensure his well-being. He’s James and she may be lost in her melancholy, may not know if the love she once felt still exists, but she can’t imagine surviving, can’t imagine living, without him.

When he said that just now, _“What is it you want from me, Lily? To give you a divorce?”�_ it was as if a part of her heart shattered. She wanted to scream at him, scream _No, no I don’t want a divorce. No I don’t want to live without you._ She hates it sometimes, ignoring his constant conversation, his constant tactics to bring her out of her shell. And she could never live without it, live without knowing someone still cares. Because she knows he does, knows he cares despite his outward charisma. She knows he cares despite his wandering eye, his few infidelities she owes more to her coldness than anything else.

She sometimes wishes she could be like she was before. She wishes she could look at him and feel a shiver go through her back. She wishes to look at him and not remember the daughter that died in his arms. She wishes she could get rid of her cold aloofness, get rid of the walls she put around herself because maybe, just maybe, if she allowed herself to feel again she would be happy.

She doesn’t pretend to be a genius on the matter of love. Doesn’t pretend to know all the answers, all the tricks when playing the lovers game. So she can’t explain to anyone, herself included, her feelings for the once dashing James Potter because she just doesn’t understand them. For most of the time she completely cold and indifferent towards him hating him because of the sorrow he causes her, but then the thought of him leaving her is too horrendous for her to even want to contemplate.

She finishes eating the breakfast he made for her and heads downstairs to where he’s reading the paper. She walks to the sink and starts washing the dishes, scrubbing her spotless plates to keep her hands busy and mind off the hazel eyes watching her.

“You could use magic, you know?”� he says in his arrogant, know-it-all manner after a few minutes of observing her.

“I know that.”� She spits at him, “But I’m tired of magic, sick of it all and everything and everyone that has to do with it.”� She turns as she speaks and stares at him in the eyes. What she meant to say was, _“James, Honey, I’m tired of being alive. I’m tired of being sad.”�_

“Everyone?”� he questions feeling a lump in his throat at the thought of her hating him.

She narrows her eyes at him, glares at his soft, black hair because it resembles their daughter’s too much. “Everyone.”� she repeats.

“Then why stay?”� he questions getting angry, “Why stay in a world you hate with a husband you care nothing about?”� He spits it her and she cringes at his words.

“Maybe I should go. Maybe it’s time we stop fooling ourselves.”� She says in her usual defeated manner.

He looks at her then, sees her for the first time as pathetic, as completely weak.

“Fine. Don’t forget to bring your drinks when you go.”� He says to her spitefully.

“Don’t forget to bring your whores.”� She retorts.

He stops when she says that, stops the fighting and looks at her in the face. For the first time he feels completely defeated, feels exhausted from the constant fighting, tired of making a big show of normalcy to a world that couldn’t even begin to comprehend his pain.

“Is this what you want, Lily? I need to know. Do you want to leave me?”� He says with urgency in his voice. She only stares at him, the empty stare she has already mastered, the soulless stare that is less than alive.

“I don’t know.”� She says after a few moments. “But maybe it’s for the best if I do. What are we doing here, James? What’s the point?”�

“The point is that you’re my wife and we’re… we’re supposed to get through this together. But you, _you_ ,”� he screams finally allowing himself to get out all the bitterness he feels towards her, “and your pride locked me out from the day of Gabby’s funeral. You shut me out, Lily, so don’t berate me on my scarce infidelities. Don’t berate me on my drowning my sorrows in someone who actually wants my company because my wife would rather drink scotch than speak to me.”�

She was silenced by his tiny rant, silenced by his passionate words because it’s been so long since she’s seen him actually feel something. She cries then, cries silently and pretends as if no tears are falling down her face. She knows she’s wronged him. She knows he’s wronged her, and this, this constant rift between them is not what a marriage is. She used to be strong, used to take charge, and as she looks at him her head raises high in her old regal manner and she looks like the young girl of seventeen she used to be. The young girl who was impervious to all his words.

“Than maybe I shouldn’t be your wife?”� She spoke to him slowly and could hardly even hear the words coming out of her mouth, could hardly comprehend she spoke them because she needs him. She can’t live without him because his presence is her torture, her very comfort.

All he does is nod his head. All he does is look at her quickly before walking out of the room, grabbing his cloak, and walking out the front door. If this were the old days she would have cried. If this were the old days she would have run after to him and screamed that she doesn’t want to be without him, that she can’t even imagine it. Instead she just turns around and finishes washing the dishes, pushing all thoughts of James and the matter of divorce out of her mind.

**A/N I hope this story is to your liking. I hope I’m taking it in a good direction. I would enjoy some input because I am very unsure about this story. REVIEW!**


	4. Gabriella Elise

**Gabriella Elise**

 

It seemed like a long walk to Sirius’s house although he only lives four blocks away. He's brooding as he walked, brooding as he does on any other day except there was a hint of desperation to his madness, a hint of regret. He was cruel, so was she, and it never gets any easier, these outbursts that randomly come. She hates him. He’s witnessed that for so long. Lily Evans hates James Potter once again. Worst of all, though, is that she blames him. She blames him for the death of their pampered darling, Gabriella Elise.

God, how the memories seem to be living today. He feels as if he wouldn’t be surprised if she popped out from around a corner. If he saw her smiling mischievously making him realize it was all a prank. _“I never died, Daddy.”�_ He hears in his mind as he allows his daughter’s form to manifest before him. _“Fooled you though, didn’t I?”�_ He does that a lot. He just forgets her death sometimes, forgets the fall she took, and feels as if she’s alive. Sees her, hears her and then realizes with complete agony that she isn’t real. He’ll reach out to touch her, to hold her, never be able to feel her and he’ll remember just like that. He’ll feel as if he was hit by a train, some powerful dark curse, and suddenly the despair he felt at her funeral resurfaces. He makes her death impossible to move on from because he hopes for the impossible with every fiber of his being. He hopes that she’s alive.

If she were alive right now she would be six years old. If she were alive right now his wife’s smile would be bright. She would be Lily again. She would be sarcastic, witty, temperamental, passionate, and he wouldn’t know what it feels like to miss someone who is standing right in front of him. He wouldn’t know what it feels like to love someone and yet realize he’s actually in love with the past, with a dream. She would love him and he would love her and this depression both have sunk into would be non-existent. He wouldn’t have to relive Gabriella’s funeral over and over again. He wouldn’t have to hear Lily’s words in his mind as she accuses him of ending their daughter’s life. 

A part of him blames himself as well. A part of him blames himself for going against Lily’s wishes and allowing her to fly. A part of him blames himself for showing his daughter how it feels to be high in the sky. He has dreams of that day sometimes. Dreams consisting of the toy broom she loved to ride on and of the fall to the ground when she tried to go too high. He relives her death every day of his life, relives the agony he felt as he watched his daughter fall far to the ground.

It was an accident, he had said to Lily. It was an accident and no one’s fault. He remembers her screaming at him a few days after, yelling taunting words like murderer, like killer. It was days before she could look at him again, days before she could lift her eyes onto the man she blames for their daughter’s death. And when she looked, saw his hazel eyes and disheveled hair, she realized that all her feelings, all her love was gone. And from that day forth, she became numb to everything, to life itself and has been that way for three straight years.

They say that a child dying is the worst catastrophe a parent could ever face. They say it kills parents from within, at their souls. It’s a loss many never recover from, a loss that tears apart happy homes. And as he reflects on it now, nearing Sirius’s doorstep he knows it’s the only fact that remains true. It wasn’t just the fact that she blamed him, because he knows that somewhere in her heart she acknowledges his innocence, knows that he would never have wanted any harm to ever come to Gabriella. But it’s the fact that she died on the inside. Her life was sucked out of her the day she realized she would no longer see her daughter again. It was worse for her than it was for him. He didn’t loose his faith right away. He didn’t lose he need to live until he realized that Lily Evans was gone and never coming back. Lily can no longer live, no longer breath, without wishing that somehow she was dead because the need to be with her daughter overwhelms her. It makes her forget everything she once loved about her life. She’s consumed in her grief and that woman back there, that woman talking about divorce and how they’re fooling themselves simply is not Lily. It isn’t her.

That woman is dead. That woman lives and yet isn’t alive. Looks and yet doesn’t see. Listens and never hears. His wife is lost, lost within her memories and lost within her alcohol. And his one problem is that neither of them have learned how to let go. Neither can move on whether it's together or apart.

He arrives at Sirius’s house and knocks loudly on the door. He waits impatiently for a few moments and knocks again with a bang of his fist. A shirtless Sirius comes to the door startled to see his friend at his flat. Startled by the dark look hovering inside his once bright eyes. He moves from the doorway and allows James to come inside.

He walks inside and slumps down on the black, leather couch. Sirius takes the seat next to him, waiting for his friend to speak. He breathes loudly, quick, swift breaths as he if just ran a marathon, swam across an ocean. Then he turns to his friend, his face darkened by the searing pain he feels on the inside.

“She wants to leave me.”� He says quietly staring at his friend.

“Lily?”� Sirius questions dumbly out of complete surprise.

“She wants to leave. Says we’re just fooling ourselves by staying together. That how we live isn’t… isn’t right.”� He says, his words getting more hopeless as he goes on.

“Lily would never leave you.”� Sirius says thinking, still, as he did back when they were teenagers. James goes on as if Sirius didn’t utter a word.

“And you know what? Do you know what, Sirius?”�

“What?”�

“She’s right. How we live isn’t a marriage. Sirius we’re like two strangers, now. We aren’t… things will never again be how they used to be.”� James says defeat sounding in every word he speaks.

“Do you love her?”� Sirius questions as his friend looks down.

“What?”�

“Do you love her?”�

He thinks for a second, thinks about the word he’s wondered about every day of his life. Thinks about Lily, about the past.

“I…I don’t know.”� He says very slowly after a moments. Sirius looks at him.

“You used to know. Back when I used to ask you it was an instant yes. An ‘ _of course I do you sod_.’ You used to know.”� Sirius replies.

“Nothing, _nothing_ , is how it used to be.”� James mutters darkly standing up from his spot. “Nothing will ever be that way again. So there’s no point, _no bloody point_ , in saying things like that. It’s in the past Sirius. She loved me once. I loved her once as well. And now… now…”� but he stops and sits on a chair facing the couch.

“And now?”� Sirius asks knowing that the end to that sentence is the answer they all seek. But James shakes his head.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”� Sirius nods and gets up from his spot.

“Fire whiskey?”� He asks, and James nods slightly.

“I can’t believe I’m drinking at noon.”� James says as Sirius hands him a glass.

“Desperate times calls for desperate measures.”� Sirius says in the light hearted voice he can always seem to employ.

“She still blames me. I can see it in her eyes. She still blames me.”� James says as he takes a sip. Sirius looks up, James hasn’t spoken to him of their daughter’s death since the funeral. It’s a topic both men like to avoid.

“You know she doesn’t really. If she blames any one it should be me. I bought Gabriella that broomstick.”�

“She wanted to wait. Did I ever to tell that? She said to me _‘James, let’s wait until she’s older.’_ And I laughed and told her that it was nonsense to wait. That it was her right as a witch to ride a broomstick.”� He said taking a big sip of the whiskey.

“You have to stop punishing yourself. She does too. It does neither of you any good.”�

“I just wonder sometimes about what it would be like if I didn’t let her on that broom. I mean, I wonder what she would be like today if she were alive. What she would look like three years older than the last time I saw her.”�

“We all wonder sometimes. But you and Lily torture yourselves over this. Everyone who knew her loved Gabby. She was an amazing child and we all lost something when she died. But you two torment yourselves over something you could not have prevented.”�

“But it could have been. If I just listened to her. If I could just go back and…”� He stops suddenly realizing how childish he was about to sound. He takes a long sip of fire whiskey and drowns in his grief.

“James, you would do exactly what you did. It’s who you are and who I am and who Gabriella was. She got our mischief side, you know. She’s like a girl version of us and she couldn’t just let that broom sit in the closet without being used. She would have taken it out when you turned your head or something. She would never have liked to play on the safe side.”�

James shakes his head as he feels tears coming to his eyes and changes the conversation from his daughter back to his wife because Gabriella is still too difficult to speak about.

“Should I let her leave me? Should I tell her that the door is open for her to go and when she’s ready I’ll sign the divorce papers?”� He asks as his heart aches with every word.

“Is it what you want?”�

“I don’t know.”� He says, again. It’s a constant feeling, not knowing what he wants, because he’s lost in a sea of desires, of emotions and he can’t pick out which are his, which ones he wishes to have and to hold, _until death do us part, right?_

“James, you have to figure it out. You have to know. Don’t think about what she wants. Think about you. Could you live without her?”�

He’s silent for a long while as a timeline of their relationship passes before his eyes, snapshots of moments. He sees himself, sixteen years old, nervous as he walks up to a girl he’s been crushing on for years and asks her out. Witnesses the turn of her head, the small nod she makes and the eyes that glowed as she said yes. He sees himself at Graduation on the lawn after the ceremony. Sees himself standing with her by the lake, sees himself go down on one knee. It may have been her huge smile as she yelled yes, may have been the closeness of their bodies as he twirled her around, but that one memory seems to take the life out of him.

He sees other things, as well. Sees them moving into their house and that day when she painted their bedroom. He sees her at the wedding, sees her beautiful form in a white gown as she kisses him and they’re declared wed. He sees her in the emergency room giving birth to their baby. Sees himself holding their little girl as Lily sheds the tears of a new mother. As he snaps out of his slight dream he hears her laughter all around him.

He looks at Sirius,

“No,”� he says “I couldn’t live without her.”� Sirius nods.

“So don’t let her go. Don’t surrender this early in the game. Fight for her James. Fight for Lily because god knows, it’s what you do best.”� He says referring to the disastrous fifth year courtship of Lily.

He smiles slightly, “It sounds nice in words. But don’t you think I’ve tried. For months after the funeral I tried to show her, to tell her I loved her. But she ignored every gesture. And it’s dead, Sirius, it’s dead.”�

“How can it be dead? It isn’t obligation that makes you stay with her. If anything it’s love.”�

“Love, what is it anyhow?”� James says in a far off voice.

“Only you can answer that.”� He says refilling their glasses. James takes another sip.

“It’s been three years, three years since she last wanted me. I… I repel her Sirius and every day she becomes more pathetic. Everyday she repels me, as well.”�

“Bring her back.”� Sirius says strongly.

“Who’s going to bring me back?”� He retorts, knowing that he needs saving as much as she does.

All Sirius does is shake his head. “Go home James. Go home and fix what’s left of your broken life because I don’t want a roommate living here any time soon.”� He says with a slight smile on his face.

James shakes his head, downs the rest of the whiskey and starts to walk to the door. He turns when he gets there.

“How do I do it?”�

“Do what?”�

“Figure out how I feel? Make her want to stay with me?”�

“I don’t know.”� Sirius says as he opens the door and allows James to walk through. “But you’ll know. When the time comes you’ll know what to do.

He stops off in a bar before going home. He’s the only person there beside the regular drunks who can’t get through the day without some beer in their system. He sits there for hours, drinking whatever his little muggle money would buy for him and prolongs going home as much as he can because he can’t see her. Not yet when the memory of their fight is so clear in his mind. Not yet when for the first time she expressed her need to get out of the life she’s living, to get out of the past. A past that he’s a part of.

It's around five in the afternoon when he arrives at home and the house is quiet. He puts his coat on the staircase banister and walks up the stairs slowly, hearing every creak as he makes his way up. He opens the door to their bedroom and sees her lying on the bed, her clothes from before still on, and one of their crystal glasses lying on the floor next to the bed. He walks over and picks up the fallen glass, puts it on her night stand, and smells the alcohol on her before he even reaches her face. Somehow, he knew she’d be here. Somehow, he felt that she would never leave. He sits on the floor in front of her, watching her breath, watching the shadows playing on her pale face. And as he watches her sleep all that he’s thinks is, _“You need to figure out how it is you feel.”�_ Figuring out how he feels will save this relationship because right now they’re both defeated. Right now neither have anything to fight for.

**_A/N: These next few chapters are gonna be rewritten or expanded upon. I may also add a chapter or so but am still debating whether or not it will take away from the story. Hope you enjoy it so far and I know my spelling errors are a bitch. I try though._ **

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	5. Ogden's Fire Whiskey (NEW)

_A/N: This takes place at the same time of the last chapter. NEW!_

 

It was painful for her the first morning she woke up and realized her daughter was gone forever. It was painful for her when she ate breakfast with James and stared longingly at the empty seat beside her. It was painful for her when she paced the living room and tripped over Gabriella's stuffed bear. That day everything Gabriella was, everything that existed while she was alive, existed after her death. All that was her daughter was still alive and to Lily that was the most painful thing of all. To exist. To realize that life was moving on and she had no power to stop it. realize that she had no power to turn back time and save her daughter’s life.

 

She dreamt of her a lot the first few months after her death. It was the time before her numbness sunk in. It was the time before she was completely closed of to this world. She had dreams of a young child’s sparkling emerald eyes. Dreams of a child’s laughter or tears and then suddenly her dreams turn into the truth of her daughter’s demise. It’s always the same. Always begins as a serene memory that would have made her smile if it weren’t so traumatic. It always ends with a long fall to the ground and a frightened scream as she sees her daughter’s dead face in her mind. It always ends with a somber funeral and a headstone with the name **Gabriella Elise** spelled out in exquisite cursive writing.

 

She finishes washing the dishes and takes her washcloth to clean up the rest of the kitchen. It’s impeccably clean. A spotless kitchen any woman would be proud to call their own. But she scrubs every counter, dusts off every chair and reorganizes each cabinet just to keep her mind busy. Just to prolong her trip to the liquor cabinet because she’s tired of being lost in her weakness. She’s tired of this surrender she gave to life three years ago.

 

She hears him leaving in her mind as she cleans. She hears him screaming at her and listens to the echo of the door as he slams it with extreme force. Tears fall down her face as she scrubs on one chair diligently. Scrubs it so hard as tears dirty its surface that one of its legs break and she falls to the floor. She screams right then as she sees his hazel eyes in her mind. Screams shrilly up at the ceiling and hurls the broken chair at the wall through her anger. Her head falls into her hands and the chair cracks against the wall. She sits there for a few moments crying to herself, cursing life for tormenting her each and every day. She walks over to the broken chair when her hysterics pass. _Reparo_ she says quietly. The chair fixes itself and she returns to her cleaning pretending that nothing ever happened.

 

She begins putting the dishes away after she is done cleaning. She ignores the wand sitting on the table and takes a good hour putting every dish back into its proper spot. She puts them back by size, by color, by which store she bought them in changing the pattern each time she realizes she will be done too soon. She puts away plates, bowls, forks, and knives all carefully placed into a specially perceived spot it took her minutes to think of because she can’t stop working. She can’t stop moving and keeping busy because it’s when she allows herself to think that her despair reaches its height. She doesn’t feel like crying again.

 

When she’s done she walks out of the kitchen and goes up the stairs. She passes her and James’s bedroom and comes to a door at the end of the hallways. She pauses at the door as her breath gets caught in her throat and she leans her hand on the painted wood to calm her body down. She stands like that for a few moments trying to get the courage to turn the handle. Trying to get the courage to lift her hand and place it securely around the knob because she needs to look at it, needs to remind herself of the daughter who plagues her every thought.

 

It is a well known fact that parents create shrines of children lost to them. Parents leave their children’s legacy in a timeless state that never changes from the time that their kids themselves walked inside that room, moved their feet on the plush carpet of their floors, and slept in the very same bed. It is a monument to them, a last hope for the parents that their children will come walking through that door this very day and sleep in the bed that has been made for too long. It is a last hope that if they didn’t hold on to there would be nothing left, nothing to keep them going.

 

Gabriella’s room hasn’t changed since that day she played in it all afternoon with one of her magical friends. Lily’s old muggle Barbie dolls are still on the floor and the various costumes for dress up are still hanging messily from her dresser. Her vanity is still full of the makeup she borrowed that day from Lily and her toy chest is wide open, half the games spilled out onto the floor. The window curtains are messily drawn and dust is visible through the sun rays that shine on the corners of the rooms and surfaces of the furniture. 

 

It’s a rather beautiful room for such a young girl. It was James who decided on it. _My daughter needs a room fit for a princess_ , he had said once Gabriella was too old for her nursery. It’s such a beautiful room. The walls are painted a light pink and outlined in a golden paint. The furniture is made of mahogany and glazed to shine in the sunlight. The wood itself has intricate designs of flowers and fairies. Beautiful designs Gabriella used to love to stare at when she was alive. The bed is a huge canopy bed with golden silk hangings and pink and gold bed covers. It is lined with pillows made of silk and sitting on the bed are three stuffed bears she could never sleep without. On one of her dressers are dozens of dolls expertly made. They’re glass dolls costing a fortune each and looking so lifelike, looking at you as if they can actually see you.

 

As Lily opens the door this room is displayed before her in all its glory, in all its harshness. She sits under the window to hide from the sun rays and just stares around at this shrine she had kept so that she would never forget. It has always been a fear she could never escape from. What if she moves on and can no longer remember? What if memories of her daughter are lost to a new life? A new child?

 

She needs to remember. Every last detail must be known because if Lily forgets her daughter will die yet again. If Lily forgets it would be as if Gabriella never existed and that is something she would never allow to happen. She can survive with the pain of knowing her daughter is gone. It’s an excruciating pain worse than a cruciatus curse but she has lived with it for so long.

 

_Three years. Thirty-six months. One hundred fifty-six weeks. One thousand ninety-five days._

__

She has lived with pain for so long that it has become a part of her. It’s as common as the breath in her lungs and the blood in her veins. It’s inside every heartbeat, every blink of her eyes. She has lived in agony for so many days she can no longer function or live without somehow being immersed in melancholy. 

 

She never told anyway that some days she begins to move on. She wakes up with a light feeling in her stomach. She smiles when she looks at James still deep in his sleep. She hums sweet songs to herself when she’s in the shower. But then she looks in the mirror. Sees a sparkle beginning to lighten up her usually dead eyes. Sees a glow in her face she thought she lost along with her youth and begins to cry because how can she do this? How can she feel so light-hearted and happy as her only daughter lies dead? And she’ll pull herself back to her depression, stay inside the shell she created for herself because she feels so frightened, so cruel at the thought of moving on and passed. Her pain keeps her connected to a person she loves more than anything else in this world and she can’t, _can not_ loose that in order to regain the semblance of the life she had lost a long time ago.

 

She sits in Gabriella’s room for hours just remembering every memory, recalling every step she ever took. She recalls her and James. Recalls their time at Hogwarts, their time when they could love each other and live in a world of makeshift happiness. And she cries at the thought of what her family once was. Cries at how far she has fallen to the ground and screams out in pain because the impact of her fall from grace brutalized her body and left so many eternal scars.

 

She sometimes wishes to love him like she used to. It never gets any easier to look at someone who used to be your reason to live and realize that they aren’t the hero you thought they were. It’s hard to look at someone and realize that this isn’t something he can rescue you from. And it hurt her because even while she hated him she ached for him to rescue her at the same time. She ached for him to cleanse her of her pain and remind her of who she once was. But he didn’t. James didn’t save her. 

 

She walks out of the room at that thought and goes down stairs to her liquor cabinet because her reminiscing has left her the need to be beautifully oblivious. On her walk down she wonders about him. She wonders about his happiness and thinks back to the fight earlier that day. _It would be so easy_ , she thinks. _It would be so easy to just pack my bags and leave. Just to leave and never look back._

 

She feels bound here somehow. She feels as if she’s trapped in a prison without neither a need nor a way to escape. But leaving, just finally breaking free is all that occupies her mind as she reaches her liquor cabinet and pulls out her Ogden’s Fire Whiskey and one of the crystal glasses that were a wedding present to her and James.

 

She walks up the stairs again holding the glass and alcohol and wonders where James is. She vaguely wonders if he’s with Sirius or Remus or his latest whore as she nears their bedroom. A single tear leaks out of her eye as she remembers the day, one and a half years ago, when her suspicions that he was unfaithful were finally made true. She remembers the beautiful cursive and the adoring words the whore spoke to her husband. She remembers her starting the letter with _My Darling James_ and remembers it ending with a grand declaration of love that made Lily physically ill to read. Maybe that was when she lost all faith in him. She shakes her head. No, it was already gone.

 

She opens her bedroom door and pushes thoughts about other women out of her mind. She walks slowly to her bed and sits lightly down on the covers as she rests her back against the pillow. She pours some fire whiskey into the glass and takes a big shot feeling a burning sensation in her throat. She takes another one as she dumbly wonders if his whores are prettier than she is. If his whores are who he wishes she could be.

 

She takes a few more shots hearing her daughter’s voice in her mind. She reaches out a few times. Reaches out to touch the long, black hair of Gabriella before realizing it was a figment of her imagination. She reaches out and touches nothing, touches air.

 

She takes more shots. Her head begins to get dizzy and her eye sight blurs as the whiskey works its own wonderful brand of magic. She fills the glass full once more after a good hour of drinking and places the near empty bottle on the table beside her. She’s smiling peacefully as she forgets the present, forgets the past, and becomes beautifully oblivious. She closes her eyes, more tears leak out that she’s too drunk to notice and she downs the last shot of whiskey. Her world turns a glamorous black as the crystal glass falls quickly to the floor. _Beautifully oblivious._

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	6. Gone

He left Lily’s side the moment she started to stir and went downstairs to pretend to sleep on the sofa. When she found him there she smiled slightly before making tea to sooth her aching head. The next day he hardly spoke to her and she was glad for his avoidance because she felt ashamed of her drinking. She felt ashamed of her lack of perfection. It’s hard, to know that she once fascinated him, once intrigued him and realize now that who she is no longer the stunning girl she used to be. So the avoidance, although slightly lonelier than usual, was welcome. Finally on Monday they were back in their old groove of ignoring each other when possible and polite conversation when necessary. But they both felt it, felt that something changed last weekend. Each felt that they can no longer live this lie each has delved into.

They hardly spoke at breakfast that morning and he couldn’t breathe easy until he put on his cloak and walked out the door. It was just the sight of her that made his mind swarm with questions. All weekend he tried sorting through his feelings, tried to finally realize if the love he once lived by is truly dead. But all he has, after two straight days of reflection, are those questions he’s becoming tired of thinking. All he has is a remembrance of an old love that continues to torture him has he thinks of ways to revive it.

When he was a child he lived in this assumption that everything in life always works out for the best. Tragedies happen only to bring forth some desired outcome that would make everything better than before. No matter how horrible of a predicament a person gets thrown into the outcome will be worth the pain that temporarily takes you over. He was an optimist when he lived at Hogwarts. James’s glass was always half full.

Being cynical just seems to fit him perfectly. He seems made for that brooding atmosphere that makes his eyes appear philosophically sad. He seems made for his supreme melancholy, seems to walk through life with a smooth assurance as a smirk darkens his handsome face. Gabriella’s death changed him more so than anything else. He couldn’t see what good could come with it. He couldn’t find a reason that she should be taken from him because what, what could be so wonderful as to allow death to steal away the life of a child? What could be worth the killing of two happy souls?

Work felt tedious for him today. He kept on seeing her in his mind. He kept on seeing her smiling face. He kept on feeling the ghost of her skin in the palm of his hand. He hasn’t looked at her in the eye for days. He hasn’t allowed his eyes to wander to her own because he’s afraid of what he might find there. He’s afraid to realize that their love truly is dead. Afraid to realize that she is just bidding her time until she can be free. All he wondered throughout the morning was, _Will today be the day? Am I going to come home to an empty house never to see her again?_

In the morning there was a staff meeting that seemed to drone on for eternity. It was the same as last week. You-Know-Who is still at large. Death Eaters made another attack the ministry wishes to keep quiet. The training of the new Aurors is going well but there aren’t enough dormitories to fit them all. James, in a week or so we’re going to ask you to risk your life on a top secret mission of the utmost importance. Frank, we need you to get your spies in order to infiltrate… blah blah blah blah. _Of course, sir_ , he remembers thinking. _Of course I’ll go on a mission to try and assassinate the Dark Lord because, sir, I have nothing left to live for._

He fell asleep once or twice during the meeting, dreamt of red hair, dreamt of green eyes and a smile of an angel. He woke up to Frank Longbottom shaking his body fast, woke up to his boss _, Sir Head Auror Moody Sir_ he thinks mockingly, scowling at him saying how back when he was first an auror they knew about respect, about responsibility. Back when he was first an auror they were more than mindless hooligans. _Yes, sir,_ he had said, _back when you were an auror you were respectful. You were obedient. Yes, sir, we are all a bunch of hapless children. Yes sir…_ he says always saying the right thing to charm his boss, to mock him in a way only his partners would know about. It’s an art, he sometimes thinks. To bring someone down without there knowledge is an art.

After the meeting he sat at his desk staring at a stack of papers he had yet to start filling out. It was the standard procedure before any mission and he hated this paperwork he had to do before any mission. This paperwork that only serves the purpose of telling him that the Ministry cannot be held responsible if anything goes wrong on the mission. It’s rather a tedious task to read papers saying how _it is not the ministry’s fault if you lose your legs, arms, or,_ god forbid _, your life. The ministry is not liable for any mishaps along the way. The ministry will compensate your families in case of an unexpected death._ There were legal aspects like that which went on and on. Little things like that which made his mind wander, wander to a girl with strawberry blond hair. Wander to a girl six years his junior.

He wrote her a note that morning telling her that he was going to leave work right after lunch and to meet him at the hotel room. He planned this all with haste and was restless for work to finish because he had a stressful weekend, looking at an even more stressful week, and the only way he could blow off some steam, the only way he could relax was to see Melissa.

It’s ironic. Every second of the past three days he thought endlessly about his wife. Every second he was trying to revive a love he assumes to be dead. And at the peak of his thoughts, the climax, he writes a note to his mistress enlisting her services for the day. Oh, the irony of his life.

He ate lunch with Frank. Sirius was busy with something or the other. He didn’t ask, didn’t really care what kept his friend away because Sirius was bound to ask questions about him and Lily that he would rather not answer. He ate a bland lunch of lemon flavored chicken left over from last night’s dinner and chips. He and Frank are always professional together while in the office. They spoke strategy for James's mission and laughed about their silly colleagues. Frank never once mentioned Lily and James stayed away from the topic of Alice. Especially because he hears they’re getting along famously. It never pleases him to listen to other couples’ successes when his relationship is failing miserably and only getting worse. Other people’s happiness makes him more bitter than any other thing could.

He felt apprehensive about seeing Melissa. He tried to picture her in his head, tried to calm his nerves by thinking about her innocence. But for the first time in a long while he felt guilty about his affair. It was a feeling he couldn’t brush off for all of lunch, which is why he made it drag on and on until Frank insisted he get back to work. He tried to do something anything to make Frank stay in the break room with him, but Frank simply could not wait to leave since he has a beautiful woman waiting for him at home. That comment was enough for James to allow Frank to leave because he could no longer look at him in the eye. He no longer wished for his company because Frank's marriage was just too... pituresque. So, because there was nothing left for him to do, he slowly walked to the hotel were a beautiful child was waiting for him. He arrives thirty minutes late.

It is four in the afternoon by the time he reaches the hotel so anxious he is about being there. He doesn’t understand his fear about being with her. He has been before, been with her many times over the last six months. So what is it exactly? Why did he wish to be any where else? Why did he wish to be home?

She is waiting for him in front of the room when he arrives looking exquisite as always. He kisses her lightly on the mouth and smiles as she says hello. She then puts the key into the door and opens the hotel room door. He starts kissing her then, leading her to the bed just after the door closes behind him. Pushes her on the bed so that he’s lying on top of her. She starts to unbutton his shirt, slowly with the hope of keeping him there for hours. But, as he kisses her he feels other lips on his own. He feels other hands pulling at his shirt and rubbing fingers lightly on his back. As he kisses her she moans his name into his mouth and he almost, almost says Lily into her lips. He pulls his lips from hers after his near slip and stares into her eyes. He looks at her, seeing for the first time only a naÃ¯ve child, a reflection of the woman waiting for him at home. Suddenly he can’t do it, can’t be with her because, because he… loves Lily. He feels it now. He feels all the old feelings coming back at him, exploding inside his body so quickly it was as if he knew, _knew_ that he loved her all along. As if he never forgot what she was to him. He jumps off the bed and backs away as if Melissa had stung him.

“I’m sorry.”� He says quickly as he buttons his shirt.

“James, what are you…?”�

“I can’t do this Mel. I can’t be in this relationship with you anymore.”�

“James…”�

“I have to go.”�

He runs out of the hotel room ignoring her desperate calls for him to come back. Runs at lighting speed through the London streets until he reaches his house. Panting he opens the door to his house, his home, which seems so bright to him, so full of light. He smiles entering the door, smiles because he knows everything will turn out okay. Smiles because he knows that now, _now_ he has something to fight for.

Up the stairs he climbs because he needs a glimpse of her, of his beloved, because he’s been blind for too long. He needs to see her, look into her emerald eyes and show her, through his own eyes, that the love once thought lost has returned. He turns the knob of their door and enters the bedroom. He needs her to know that they no longer have to live in the depression each has gotten so used to.

She’s sitting on the bed half covered in shadows when he walks in. At first he doesn’t notice her crestfallen face or the dried tears staining her cheeks, but then as he gets ready to speak a suitcase by the bed catches his eye.

“Lily?”� He questions. She looks up at him, same dull eyes, same pale face and yet she seems rejuvenated in his eyes. She seems more beautiful than ever before.

“Lily I want to…”� She cuts him off before he can continue.

“I’m leaving James. I’m going home.”� She says quickly without a single quiver in her voice. She remains strong and regal, a trait he always adored in her.

“No!”� He says. “No, you can’t go.”� His heart starts pounding as he watches her stand up and grab her suitcase. “You can’t leave me, Lily!”� He demands desperately.

“There’s nothing to stay here for.”� She says. “Let me pass.”� She says as he blocks her way.

“No. I need you here. _I need you_.”� He replies helplessly trying to make her stay.

She pushes her way past him and starts walking down the stairs.

“Lily, please, _please_ don’t go. I know these past years have been torture. I know you’re miserable. But it can change. It _will_ change.”�

“Stop promising things you have no control over.”� She spits at him when she reaches the door looking at him with fire in her eyes. “Just stop, James, stop fighting for a life that no longer exists.”�

“It can still exist, Lily. But, you have to let it.”�

“No,”� she says in her usual defeated manner and her voice begins to crack, “no more.”� And she opens the door and walks out.

“Lily!”� he yells running after her as she hails a taxi.

“Go back inside James.”� She says harshly. “Let me be.”�

“No!”� he says as she opens the cab door. “No, please don’t do this.”� He begs desperately. “Don’t leave me, please.”� Tears are coming to his eyes but all she does is shake her head.

“Goodbye James.”� She says as she shuts the taxi door and rides out of his life.

“No,”� he says to her retreating car. “No come back.”� He screams fully knowing his words are futile. He waits outside as the cab slowly disappears into the horizon. He waits until the setting sun begins to glare angrily in his eyes. Waits until nightfall hoping that she would change her mind and come back to him, and come home. Then, after hours of waiting on the doorstep, he walks inside their house, dark shadows filling up the room that was bright just hours before, and goes to his bedroom where he infiltrates her stash of scotch. 

_No_ , he says in his mind all night as he drinks. _No you can’t leave me because I love you. I love you, Lily._ He drinks more and more alcohol as he thinks the very words she’ll never hear, the very words that may have made her stay. The words that, as he looked into her dead eyes, he was afraid to speak.

**A/N: The next chapter is going to be brand new as chapter five was. It’s going to be these events from Lily’s point of view so for those of you who think this was a bit hasty and out of the ordinary it will be the explanation the original version did not have. I hope to tweak the last chapters up a bit as well. Please review!**


	7. Nothing Left

The house is quiet whenever he leaves for work and she is again left inside her makeshift solitude she seems to thrive off of more than anything. She sits at the kitchen table and reads the Daily Prophet in silence as she tries her best to ignore the echoes of the past ringing in her ear. She does her best to ignore the sorrowful cries of yesterday, but as always it eats away at her as she realizes for the first time that she doesn’t want to be alone. It eats away at her as she remembers, for the first time, how warm she felt when he wrapped his arms around her.

 

Being alone is tricky. Some people thrive off it. They thrive off of empty rooms and thrive off of the thoughts in their heads they love to contend with. They are the people that lurk in the shadows because crowds aren’t as comforting as the painful loneliness that would eat away at their soul if they were to acknowledge the fact that they were, in actuality, in pain. Being alone is a wonderful thing. Having only yourself to rely on keeps your emotions safe and won’t allow someone to break you. Being alone won’t give life the satisfaction at tearing you apart over and over again. But it only works if your mind drowns in it. It only works if you are so lost within your pain you don’t even remember what it was like to love a crowded space. If you don’t even remember what it felt like to open your heart to the world and be so painfully, yet beautifully, vulnerable.

 

She remembers the exact moment she drowned. It was three months after the funeral and she was speaking to her mother about life after the death of her daughter. She remembers her mother trying to comfort her through her pain. She remembers her spouting philosophical nonsense that just seems so ridiculous to Lily whenever she thinks of it. But what she remembers most is her mother wiping her tears from her face. She remembers soft fingers touching her face as her mother told her, “Everything happens for a reason.”�

 

She lost her faith in that moment. She lost any ounce of will she had within her as that phrase left her mother’s lips. She lost her faith as she looked into her mother’s cold eyes and begged her mother to tell her one reason there could be for taking her daughter’s life. She begged her mother to say one thing because how? How could her daughter’s death be justified in such a demeaning way? How could it even be possible? Her mother just stared at her blankly and took another sip of her tea. She turned her eyes away from her broken daughter, ignored the desperate tears smudging her beautiful face and Lily’s heart tore for the last time.

 

She hasn’t been home since that day. She couldn’t face her mother after that one moment when she took away all the hope that could have remained inside of her. She wonders if it was her mother that actually killed her. She wonders if this is her fault because she so savagely tore away her heart as she spoke about her daughter’s death being some ordinary ‘plan’ and not the life-altering, soul sucking tragedy Lily knew it was. She closes her eyes and sees a girl falling from the sky. She closes her eyes and sees her mother calmly whispering words of hope. She closes her eyes and sees his face looking back. She sees him mouthing ‘I love you’ and then sees herself, holding a letter in her hand and tears falling down her face. It must have been all three.

 

She never really speaks about James’ affairs to anyone. She likes to pretend that they don’t exist. She likes to pretend that James did indeed remain faithful despite the fact that for months she couldn’t even look at him. The first time she found out about his affairs she knew what was left of her heart broke. It wasn’t him. She doesn’t completely blame him because she knows, knows that if she didn’t delve into her mind he would never have strayed. But she thought of him kissing someone else, holding someone else, and telling someone else that he loves her and she lost it. 

 

She blames herself and over the years has gotten used to his wandering eye. Some people would call her a fool to stay with a husband of such blatant infidelity, but they can’t understand. She pushed him to it. She pushed him to find comfort wherever he could since she so cruelly denied it to him and he did. He found comfort in those mere child beauties that made him feel seventeen again. In those beauties that could help him to forget whereas her face only helped to remember.

 

Of course she hates it. Cold or not. Love him or not. He’s still her husband and it still hurts to know that he lies to her. Still hurts for him to climb into bed in the late night hours. She always knows where his been. Even in sleep the scent of cheap perfume reaches her nostrils and she wants to make a big show of coughing and gagging just so he could see how disgusting he is. So he could know without a doubt that she knows. So that each time he’s with them he thinks of her, knows only her, and feels guilt because his wife is sitting alone at home waiting for him.

 

She never does though. She keeps her eyes closed. She keeps her breathing steady and she goes back into her dream world where she finds the freedom she can not achieve anywhere else. She never reprimands him for it. Never shows she has less than a blind eye unless it is a moment of anger when she burst out with all the sadness she feels. He does the same. He ignores her drinking until the point in which he can use it against her. They use each other’s weaknesses to pain each other.

 

Does she love him? It’s a question she always asks herself because she never once believed that a love like theirs could just fade away. But it seems that it has. It seems that everything they once were to each other has vanished and what, what is the point in continuing this charade? What is the point in trying so hard to regain something that seems to be lost forever? 

 

She won’t even fight to regain it. She won’t lift a finger to win back their old relationship because she has nothing. There is nothing for her to fight for. For James? For an old life she doubts could ever again exist? She has nothing to fill her with her old passion so that she could indeed win a battle of the hearts. So she could indeed win in this war against melancholy.

 

She looks around her. She remembers moving in here with him. Remembers seeing this house for the first time and knowing it would be ideal for the family she planned to raise. When she was young she had always wanted to live in London. She wanted to get away from the boredom of the suburbs and live in the place excitement was born in. She was born for adventure. Born to be torn away from the muggle world because it was just too small for her to become what she wanted. She was meant for more, meant for the magical world because only within that would opportunities allow her to reach her astounding potential.

 

The tables have turned. More and more is this opportunistic world looking like the prison she escaped from so long ago. More and more are the walls closing in around her trapping her within life, within magic. The muggle world seems a place of new beginnings. A place to forget the debris of an old ruined life and begin from scratch. It is becoming her way to regain what she lost so long ago.

 

But to get there she has to cross a sea, climb over a mountain, and fight fire breathing dragons. To get there she has to forget about him, forget about this old life that haunts her so she could live. She wants to be alive again. She wants to smile. She wants to laugh. And with each day she stays here it becomes more of an impossibility. With each day a bit more of her dies and she knows that if she stays, if she doesn’t leave, then she’ll truly be dead.

 

But to go home. To go home to a mother whose notoriously cold and a father who was at work more than at home. Go home and see the face of a sneering sister and remember the coldness of her childhood. Go home to a life she promised never to return to because it feels beneath her. It feels beneath the new life she had so easily gained fifteen years ago. Go home, to that mother? to that even colder sister? She shivers at the thought and tries to wipe it far from her mind and pretend it’s just like the fantasies she gets every other week. She pretends her longing soul isn’t already reaching out for freedom because she can never bring herself to turn the doorknob and walk out the door. She can never bring herself to leave because she thinks she may leave her heart in London if she goes. If she walks away, she’ll leave a piece of her soul.

 

If she stays, what then? If she leaves, what then? There are no answers, no reason for her to go or to stay but she knows one thing. If she goes at least she knows there’s a chance at salvaging her broken world. If she goes, at least there’s a chance for happiness in years to come because golden eyes won’t haunt her every waking moment. There is a chance for something to change because she’s stuck in a limbo she just wants to escape from. 

 

She breathes in deeply and cries at that thought. She cries small tears she doesn't bother to wipe away and heads upstairs knowing in her heart what she needs to do. Silent droplets fall down her face as she takes a suitcase out of the closet. It’s time she stops fooling herself. It’s time for her cowardice to disappear. 

 

**A/N: Hope you liked this chapter. I thought it was alright.**


	8. Back Home

She once promised herself that she would never return home once she left. It was a sad night when she made her solemn vow. Her sister, once her best friend and now a distant relative she has no contact with, came home crying one night when Lily was fifteen and Petunia twenty-three. She and her fiancée fought. She never heard the details of the fight and after Petunia met Vernon she seemed to forget the night all together, but she knew that her sister had been struck and left in destitute by the man she was supposed to marry. He left her to live on the mercy of her parents.

She was always so proud when she was young. She always strove to be independent because she loved making her own way in the world. She love knowing that everything she has she accomplished on her own. It’s true, she thinks a lot, that she has been very dependent on James in the past few years. After Gabriella died she quit her job at Flourish and Botts, lost contact with all her close friends, and James was her sole life source which consequently added to her resentment of him. But it was different. She wasn’t a burden left on his doorstep for him to take care of. She wasn’t a child that left for a seemingly opportunistic life suddenly turning up on his doorstep. She was his wife and he promised to care for her. He promised to care for her in sickness and in health. He made a solemn vow to always be there that she has finally taken the pains of releasing him from.

It feels like a long drive for her. She hardly notices the London streets busy with city dwellers. Hardly sees the country hills the buildings of the city faded into. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She couldn’t stop thinking about the look in his eyes when she said she was leaving, the devastation she never thought would be there. She couldn’t stop touching her arm where he grabbed as a last resort to keep her with him. She couldn’t stop wishing for his warmth to be around her and had to remind herself time and time again why she left. Why she had to venture back to a place she wished to never return to. 

It was supposed to be simple. He wasn’t supposed to care. But when she closed the cab door, when she looked in his eyes and said goodbye, she felt as if she made his whole world come tumbling down.

She shakes her head and looks out the window. She feels she’s getting closer. She smells the distinct scent of snobbery crawling up her nose and a frown forms on her face. She breathes deeply at the thought of being there. She wished she could turn the cab around. She wished she could just go back to him because the thought that any minute now she would be back there makes her throat constrict and gives her the feeling of being strangled. She loves her parents, loves them very much, but she grew up in an aristocratic life style ruled by strict manners. Grew up with regulations about how she was supposed to act. Her earliest memory was being taught proper dinner manners and she sometimes cries that she was never allowed to play in the mud. She sometimes cries that the first time she wore her hair in a pony tail or yelled in public was her first year of Hogwarts when she was eleven.

Maybe that’s why she secretly detested her home. For someone with such a strong spirit, strong will, it’s hard to be put in a cage of rules. It’s hard to be told that her tears were forbidden. It was hard to be told that her voice couldn’t be heard because she was born to scream her opinion from the highest peak into the lowest valley. It wasn’t until she became a witch that she was allowed any freedom, that she threw her manners to the wind and became the passionate woman she once was.

When the cab driver pulls into the long driveway she breathes in apprehensively and silently prays for the driver to turn around and forget to drop her off. The car comes to a stop in front of large pink doors and she walks out of the car as the driver goes to the trunk to get her suitcase out of the back. She pays him in muggle money and he leaves without another word.

She stands in front of the door for a few minutes still debating in her mind whether or not this was a good idea. Still wondering whether or not she should have left at all. But her hand slowly rises and with a shaky finger she rings the doorbell. A small woman, shorter than herself, opens the door. Her fiery red hair is in a bun at the top of her head and her dark brown eyes are bright with surprise. She smiles as she looks at her mother. She notices the lines in her face she hasn’t seen before and the tiredness she blames on old age more than anything else. They throw themselves into each others arms and, despite her better judgment, Lily begins to cry.

They stand in the doorway for five minutes before she lets go of her mother, smiles sadly, and takes her suitcase up the stairs and into her bedroom. There she is bombarded with memories. Nothing has changed from when she was seventeen and she feels like crying all over again as she stares at the lavender walls and touches the few quidditch posters she put up after sixth year.

She walks to her nightstand and picks up her old jewelry box. The pink still sparkles and the gold paint hasn’t chipped at all. She opens it and still hears the sweet music, still sees the small ballerina twirling by a small mirror. She sits in her desk chair and begins to look at the jewelry inside. There’s a gold locket she got when she was seven years old, a picture of her and petunia on the inside. It was her favorite necklace until she was nine years old and her neighbor insulted her because of it. Next she picked up a beaded bracelet. There are few of those in there from crafts she once loved to do, beads of all different colors and even some red and gold ones from her earlier years at Hogwarts. Suddenly, a silver chain catches her eyes and she picks it up. On the chain is a beautiful lily, white with subtle pinks shaded in it and a silvery outline. There’s a diamond in the middle and as she looks at the necklace she begins to cry. It was the first present James ever gave her.

She puts the necklace into the box not wanting to reminisce any further and climbs on her bed. She’s hit with the fatigue of not sleeping for a few nights and as soon as she hits the pillow she falls asleep dreaming of a handsome young boy with tousled black hair and mischievous hazel eyes. Dreams of a pretty young girl with wild red curls and bright emerald eyes. She dreams of a time when she’s seventeen because more than anything she wishes she could go back and fall in love with James all over again.

She doesn’t wake up until the next morning and her mother and father are waiting patiently in the parlor with some tea their servants brought to the table. She walks down in her pajamas and hugs her father with the same lack of enthusiasm she did with her mother the day before. Both parents can see the change in her. Both of them see how the life has been sucked out of their daughter. They haven’t seen her since their granddaughter’s funeral and when they look at her now it’s as if she’s been frozen in time since that day. She’s still horribly pale and thin, still horribly depressed, but they smile and her father pets her lovingly calling her Princess, her old nickname.

They have small talk for a few moments. They talk about work. Talk about Petunia and other relatives she has no true care for. They ask about the wizarding world. They ask if it’s still dangerous because they remember her letter a year or so ago about attacks. They ask if she’s been feeling well, if she eats, if she ever goes out anymore. But they don’t being up James or ask her why she came until her mother tactfully blurts it out. Until her mother asks her daughter with her characteristic, blunt coldness why her daughter so suddenly showed up on her doorstep. Tears well-up in her eyes.

“Well, you see,”� Lily says her voice quivering, “James and I haven’t been getting along like we used to and… and I feel like we can’t go back to the way it was before. Ever since… we… I… it was time to move on.”� She finally says.

“Move on, Princess?”� her father questions.

“What’s the point in holding on, Daddy? Everything we ever were to each other is gone and… and I can’t go back to him. There’s nothing left there.”�

She falls silent after that and as her mother moves to say something else, her father shakes his and they let her drink her tea in peace. It’s hard for them to imagine. Of all the couples in the world they believed Lily and James were a shoe in to survive. It seems impossible that she could have left him. It seems impossible to them that she could have come here because she has no where else to go.

But they didn’t question her again. They saw now first hand that the Lily they brought up, the Lily that fascinated and charmed everyone she met, was gone and replaced with this sorrowful woman. They still loved her. She was still their daughter. But inside of them was a deep remorse that the daughter who now sits with them at dinner and sleeps in her childhood bed is not the daughter that left them so many years ago. It as if their worst fears have come alive. As if there daughter has truly died and been replaced with… with someone they can’t even recognize.

They fall into an easy routine and after four days she feels slightly more comfortable being there. On the fifth day she forgets her initial hatred of the beautiful mansion and feels slightly more at home in the place she grew up in. She sits and reads for most of the day. She sits in a cushioned chair out back with a cup of tea that magically refills itself whenever she wants some more, and she smiles serenely at how her mind has been blank since she got there. She smiles at how it feels like a lifetime ago that she got into a cab and tore out a piece of her soul.

It was on the fifth day that the owls began to arrive. She thought it was a sweet gesture at first although it made her cry for hours afterwards because his handwriting was still like it was in Hogwarts and she knew his words were heartfelt. She cried with each word she read although no words of love were present, no begging for her to come home was written. It was merely a lovely note acquiring after her health, begging her to be alright and let him have a word about her well-being. A small, polite note. A note that _he_ took the time to write.

She put it in a tin box where she kept the old Hogwarts’ love letters he wrote her. She put it in the box that night after reading it over and over again and put that in her drawer. She promptly fell asleep after unconsciously dreaming about hazel eyes and a time when she remembered how to smile.

It was a few days later that she realized he was going to send a letter everyday. Each letter was written with more feeling. Each letter had more words of affection and more hints to go back to him. She read them all, read each of them over and over again sitting by her window and looking at the moon knowing that he’s looking at that same moon. Read each letter until she had every word memorized because she was so in love with the fact that _he_ wrote to her. She was so in love with that fact that he may still care.

Her mother made a point to not talk about the letters James kept sending after Lily made a point to stress that she didn’t want to talk about it, that _no_ she wouldn’t write him back because she doesn’t want to speak with him. But each night her mother listened to her daughter’s heart-wrenching tears with anguish in her heart knowing that her daughter is in pain and that the one person who could help her is being shut away.  She feels anguish at the fact that James could save her, could cure her daughter’s heartache, but is being left behind from that coldness she adopted God knows when.

But, then she thinks about it in depth one night. She thinks about her assumption that James is the only one who can save her and realizes that he had three years to try. He had three years and yet he couldn’t bring her old smile to her face, couldn’t lift his finger enough to make her want to stay with him. He had three years and yet her daughter is still an empty shell, still wondering if all the goodness has left the world because her eyesight has become so jaded. She began to hate him that night.

By night thirty Lily was getting restless as she sat crying about his latest letter. It was still more detailed than the twenty ninth but then she laughs at his ability to say nothing in so many beautiful words. He goes into details about his work, about Sirius, and _oh, did you know Remus dropped by for a few days? Yes, and Peter too._ There were words of regret, many different, complex ways of simply telling her he misses her. His words, she still thought, were very sweet.

But she cried because more than anything she wanted him to give her a reason to go back to him, to go home. Missing her isn’t enough because god knows he’s missed her for years. God knows, she’s missed him for just as long. But she wants to go back, so badly wants to see him with his arrogant grin. So badly she wants to listen to his charming words and funny anecdotes she never got tired of through the years. She wants to sit in his arms and watch the stars or stroll on a beach with his hand in her own. She wants to go back but cries each night because he doesn’t give her anything to go back to. There is no clue, no hint that anything is different from the depressing day when she left. She’s tired of being empty, tired of waking up each morning and asking herself what’s the point. Tired of not wanting to live, of feeling defeated because she was once so strong. But there’s no point in leaving to go to him if she’ll still avoid him at all cost. There’s no point in returning to London if he’ll still slip out at night to visit the whores. He never, not once, promised her that things will change. He just states, _Lils_ _, I miss you. Lily, the house, it’s so lonely and big without you._ Meaningless stuff she takes to her heart hoping that they hold some truth yet knowing the words aren’t strong enough to convince her he’s sincere.

She wants to believe it will be different. She wants to believe these letters might be a sign of some change he went through. But she gave up on believing, gave up on hope because she can no longer see any light in her future at all. She uses the excuse too much, _my daughter’s death destroyed me,_ but as she saw her child being lowered into the ground it was as if piece of her heart, her very being went with her. So she can no longer take this leap of faith James’s letters would make her take. She can no longer blindly venture into the world with him like she used to because, because she’s terrified of what pain could be lurking in a corner. So instead she sits and reads his letters each day. Instead, she sits and watches the moon knowing the same one is shining on him, and lets every letter go without a response, without a drop of hope to warm her frozen heart. It just isn’t enough, not anymore, not ever.

**A/N: Ok so we have like three chapters left. Yes, the story will be a bit longer than I predicted. I know it’s a longer wait this time but I have been working on college applications and summer homework for my AP classes. Sorry but school starts in three weeks for me. But this’ll be done very soon. Oh and, who read the sixth book? ‘eyes wide with amazement at what happened.’ I don’t want to say anything to ruin it but OH MY GOD and REVIEW!**


	9. Day 31

**DAY 28**

The music plays low in the master bedroom as he sits at his desk, the curtains down, a candlestick lit for light. There’s an expensive crystal glass glittering in the candlelight. Its contents, rum or whiskey whatever the day’s preference, shine as if it’s the ocean and the sun. He sits there, his eyes cloudy, his heart beating, staring at a piece of blank parchment lying in front of him. He has an eagle quill suspended above the parchment and the blue ink he uses falls in tiny droplets one by one.

His face glows eerily in the candlelight and a grimace is in place of his usual, albeit sad, smile. His eyes are clouded with the musk of despair and around his jaw and mouth hair has grown from days he went without shaving. There’s a pile of letter waiting for him downstairs. Three are from Sirius, two from Remus, five from Peter, and another ten from Frank Longbottom, which are more than half work related. He doesn’t open them, just glances at the pile each night to see, to see if she finally picked up a pen and decided to give him a word, any word to show him that maybe she does still care.

He looked at the pile each day for the past month and goes to sleep each night with his stomach full of the vilest of disappointments. It means too much to him. He knows her all to well to expect that she would take a pen and write. He knows that at this very moment her mind is lingering on him and on their past because like him he knows she must be hurting from this self-imposed separation. It had to be impossible for him to feel so much pain in his heart for her to feel nothing at all. Deep inside he knows she misses him. He knows she misses him to much to allow her feelings to be hindered by use of a pen, but the need to see her writing has come to mean too much to him.

He puts the quill to the parchment and writes down the date, _November 16, 1979_. He begins the letter as usual, with Dear Lily. Some days he writes My Darling in his beautiful scripted letters she’s been jealous of since they were children. His beautiful script that has stayed constant, stayed the same even as everything around them changed so drastically. Then he begins his letters, each letter bolder than the last, each letter filled with more feeling, more pain and desperation. But each letter completely impersonal, filled with silly words about life that she can never bring herself to care about and without the heartfelt declarations of love he can never bring himself to write.

The letters were his last hope at reaching her and even that, even those carefully constructed letters, are merely an appearance, a display that to any person who hardly knows James could seem completely obligatory. To read the words of a man trying to reach his estranged lover and realize that he is saying nothing of importance would make anyone wonder at the reason he even tries at all. It would make anyone wonder if he does actually care as much as his pained eyes make it seem or is that too, that carelessness of outward appearance and distinct sadness, merely a front his acquaintances would expect him to put on. You’d have to be a close confident to know that the turmoil he feels is completely legitimate. You’d have to be a close confident to know that James Potter could never commit deep feelings on paper.

Sirius has remonstrated with him about the objective tone in his letters. He tells James, with a pathetic glare, that Lily most likely doesn’t care that the weather is cold and, quote, quite comfortable. He tells them that although Lily loves Remus to death reading about his struggle in the workforce isn’t exactly what she wants. Sirius begs him to write more, to write to her that he loves her because he knows that nothing else will move her enough to make her return, will move her enough to save the self-destructive person James is slowly becoming. But James can’t do that. He can’t write down those words all are urging him to write.

He doesn’t think its right, telling someone by mail that he loves them. Love is such a personal, meaningful emotional and he doesn’t, never has, taken it lightly. Telling her without her face in front of his, without her seeing the honesty in his eyes or him seeing the glow within her, demeans the emotions within his very heart. Lily knows that, he thinks everyday, knows that proclamations of love should not be given or taken lightly. She knows his convictions given that feeling and wonders how she could have forgotten. How could she have forgotten his love notes were never deep? That nothing meant more to him than when they were face to face, eye to eye, because he needs to see her unmotivated, true emotions light up before his very eyes?

He finishes the letter with Yours Truly writing again in a calligraphic style many would be jealous of. He whistles calling Nolan, his owl, to his side and ties the letter to the owl’s leg. He watches from his window as Nolan flies off. Watches with the bottle of rum by his side and his filled glass in hand. Watches until the sun goes down when he surrenders to the idea that she won’t be responding. Then he extinguishes the candle and falls asleep wearing the same clothes he has for the past three days and his breath smelling heavily of alcohol.

**DAY 29**

Sirius comes around early that day, around the time he’s just finished with his daily letter, and cajoles him into going out to brunch, in spending the day out doors. They go to a nice place on the corner of 31st street. It’s a quaint place with pink drapes on the windows and old fashioned writing on the walls. They sit at a table with a frilly table cloth and Sirius orders coffee and a breakfast of eggs for them both as James looks around at his surrounding and states to Sirius that Lily always loved the muffins they made here. As James remembers Lily eating here while she was pregnant with Gabriella.

He spent breakfast doing his best to cheer James up and when he paid the bill James could smile without it looking like a grimace, could make a joke when Sirius does something stupid. They decide to spend the day in Diagon Alley and when they get there Remus is sitting in the Leaky Caldron waiting for them. Sirius had called him earlier that morning. The first thing they do when they enter is go to Quality Quidditch Supply and Sirius and Remus are delirious with excitement when they realize that it was James who suggested they go.

They talk about dumb things, pointless things. They talk about Chuddley Cannon’s last play, talk about Puddlemore’s embarrassing loss, much to James’s disappointment. They debate about the best broomsticks: Sirius still loves the cleansweep but Remus always preferred the Shooting Star series. James kept a diplomatic silence during this (sadly) heated argument between the two friends. They check out the new equipment: gloves that don’t let your hands get cold, cloaks that won’t get wet in rain, goggles with a fogless charm on them. All that stuff which they see it now and wonder if it would have changed their game back in Hogwarts, wonder what it would be like to play with the new technology they had to live without.

They end up in Flortescue’s Ice Cream shop at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. They sit at a table and reminisce about the times they came here at Hogwarts, about the old school years when life seemed wonderful. Sirius and Remus are careful to make no mention of Lily, to replay their Hogwarts years as if she never existed, but as they speak about their old pranks and games, as James laughs about the time Sirius had pink hair for a week, they saw a sadness forming in his eyes as he remembers their relationship when they were sixteen and seventeen. They seem a sadness form in James’ eyes when he remembers how happy they all used to be. They end the conversation soon after that.

At around sundown James apologizes to his friends and tells them he has to return home. Remus tries to make him stay, lightly asks him to go to dinner, lightly tries to bribe him into going to a pub. But he looks to the sky, knows that Nolan should be back by now, and politely says he’s rather tired and would like to get some sleep. Remus shakes his head  in disappointment but he doesn’t let James leave without making plans to see him the next night. All James can do is accept.

Back at home he quickly goes to the kitchen and sees his owl perched on the window sill. He walks over to the mail spot, throws a few letters out of his way, and looks for any sign of her dainty writing. When he doesn’t see a letter from her he goes up stairs and promptly falls asleep.

**DAY 30**

He wakes up rather late this morning and has only time to write a meaningless letter to her before Remus comes barging into his bedroom and yells at him to get his arse dressed. He scowls at his friend and puts on some clothes muttering to himself about imbeciles, about the manners that his friend Remus just doesn’t have.

They spend the day at Sirius’s work (he’s a publicist for Quidditch teams) and Sirius gets his bosses to allow James, Remus, and himself to go on the pitch in between Chudley Cannon practices. It was supposed to cheer him up but all it did was make him hear cheers of past games he played in when he was still Gryffindor’s golden boy. It was supposed to cheer him up but all it did was make him look towards the stands looking for red hair, listen for her cheering, and realize that she wasn’t there and never would be again. It was supposed to cheer him up but all it did was remind him that he was no longer in the prime of his life and he has nothing, no child, no wife, nothing to show for it but new wrinkles on his forehead and a newly acquired drinking problem. Sirius and Remus quickly learned that their hard planned diversion was a complete and utter failure.

That night James and Remus go to a club by James’ house. James was waiting for this moment, the moment Remus picks where he leads an unsuspecting James into a corner so that Remus could analyze his head and give him some profound advice he should have thought of a month ago. James has been waiting for the moment when Remus plays the ever wise friend and makes James resent his own stupidity as well as his friend’s attention and kindness. Remus stares at him for a while and doesn’t begin to speak until James begins his second beer, Remus’s first one only half way done.

“So, James,”� he says, “how’ve you been?”� He looks at Remus as if he’s crazy and shakes his head.

“Why don’t you get to the point, Moony? Because you know bloody well how I’ve been.”�

“Still drinking?”�

“Still breathing?”�

“Wow, even depressed and your wit doesn’t cease.”� He says trying to make a joke but only furthering James’s despair.

“You have to stop this James. You have to stop.”�

“I can’t. I… can’t.”�

“She left you James, _left you_ , and the sooner you deal with it the sooner you can move on. Get on with your life.”� James slams a fist to the table.

“I don’t want to move on, to get on with my life.”� James says scathingly at even the thought of living without her. “I want her Remus. She’s the…the only person who can make me right.”�

“Have you even tried to get her to come home?”�

“You’ve seen the letters.”�

“Those are hardly trying. They border on pathetic James.”� Remus says strongly and James looks down.

“There’s nothing else I can do.”� He says quietly taking another sip of his beer.

“You can write exactly how you feel.”� Remus says

“You know I can’t do that. It’s not right.”� James replies and Remus lets it go knowing of his friend’s ingrained beliefs.

“Why don’t you go there?”�

“To her house?”�

“Yes.”�

“I don’t want to die Remus and her mother has always hated me.”�

“You should go. Your mother-in-law shouldn’t be what's in your way.”�

“She doesn’t want to see me.”�

“How do you know? How do you know if you don’t try?”�

“If she wanted me, to see me, she would still be here wouldn’t she?”� He snaps.

Remus shakes his head sadly, “Not if there isn’t anything here for her. Not if she thinks everything she was to you is dead.”� He shakes his head again and throws some money on the table.

“I need to get up early tomorrow and find a job. Think about what I told you.”� He says taking one last look at James before walking out the door. That night James didn’t even check to see if she wrote.

**DAY 31**

He starts the morning off as usual: pours a glass of rum, turns on his soothing classical music, and sits idly at his desk staring at, at nothing at all. He has thoughts going on in his head today, thoughts about going to Surrey, about not giving up. It isn’t surprising to him, that he’s going to succumb to Remus’s advice and go to her. Remus has that effect. It’s why they (Sirius and Peter) sent him to do the dirty work. No one can ignore advice given by Remus. He knows how to get into a person’s head and knows how to keep himself there until his advice is acted on, usually with haste. And as if stung by a bee he hops out of his chair and into the shower, making sure to use his good smelling soap and to shave his face clean.

He takes a while getting ready making sure his appearance is impeccable, stopping every few seconds to wipe the nervous sweat from his face. His heart is beating fast and his stomach is in knots. The last time he was this nervous about seeing her he was getting ready for their wedding.

He aparates outside of her house in Surrey and cringes slightly at how it hasn’t changed. It seems unreal that something could still be like it used to because everything else around him has been altered once and altered again. This house is like his handwriting, unchanged through turmoil and time and he wonders slightly if her room is still lavender, if it still smells like baby powder and rosemary. He takes a deep breath and walks to the door, thinking about what to say over and over again, remembering that he loves her and that she may love him as well. And then he knocks on the large pink door in front of him.

A small woman with brown eyes and graying red hair in a bun opens the door. He groans inwardly and curses his luck that her mother had to answer the door. He smiles slightly at her accusing stare and musters up what remains of his once charming smile.

“Hello Mrs. Evans.”� He says quietly.

“James, what are you doing here?”�

“Please Mrs. Evans, please can I speak to Lily?”� his eyes begging her but her cold stare unrelenting.

“I’m sorry she isn’t seeing guests.”�

“I’m hardly a guest. I’m her husband. Please,”� he says urgently, “please let me see her. Let me see my wife!”� His voice raising as he goes.

“Don’t you dare call her that! She’s hardly _your_ wife. Go home, James. Turn around and leave. You don’t belong here and you,”� she looks at him with a disapproving stare, “never have.”� She begins to close the door but he blocks it with his foot and screams.

“Lily!”� he screams to the inside past her mother. “Lily, do you hear me?”�

“James, you’re acting crazy.”� She says as she tries to close the door despite his body blocking its way. He ignores her.

“Lily, please come down here! Please Lily!”� He shouts.

“Lily, I love you! Do you hear me? I love you!”� He screams as her mother’s persistence finally works and James falls down the steps leading to the house.

“It’s over, James. Reconcile to the fact and move on.”� She says harshly and closes the door in his face. Feeling defeated, feeling as if he has finally lost, he nods his head a few times and stands up. With a loud crack he’s gone, watery emerald eyes watching him from a window the whole time.

**A/N: I had no idea how to do this chapter but I hope it’s good. Sorry for the wait. Almost done. REVIEW!**


	10. Love

A/N: Heavily Redone!

His words echo in her head as she sits on her window seat. _Love?_ It has been years since she’s heard him say that word. It has been years since she was able to associate that word with his feelings for her. _Love?_ She thinks again because the shock of him being here still has not hit her. She sits transfixed at her window staring at the spot he was just moments before unable to process the fact that James was here. Unable to process the fact that he did something she had given up on. He came to rescue her.

The door creaks open and her mother’s small form enters the room. Her green eyes survey the elder woman without seeing her. She looks passed her mother’s form, looks passed the cold eyes trying so hard to appear warm and looks into another time when she had been so happy. She looks into another time and sees only his face, only hazel eyes that seem to her to be utterly perfect. She doesn’t see her mother until she speaks her name, until “Lily?”� falls out of her mother’s lips. She looks at her and snaps back into the present. She snaps back and begins to cry at the shock of him being there. Love, she thinks again this time realizing that James does need her.

Her mother puts her arm cautiously around her as she cries and Lily shoos her overtures away. She lightly pushes her mother aside as her tears stop and she looks at herself in the mirror. She’s only twenty-six. When did her eyes become so old? When did the sparkle leave her face? She looks at her mother with stony eyes, hating the fact that she’s there, that she sent him away, and signals for her to leave. Without question her mother is gone.

She looks back to the mirror and sees herself as she was a long time ago. She touches her pale face, runs fingers through her smooth red hair and slowly sees the arrogance come back to her eyes. She slowly sees wisps of her former self returning and in that instant she knows it’s him. Without even being there he’s fixing her, making her feel alive again and she knows that only one thing could make her feel this way. She knows that she loves him as well. She looks around her room, sees the suitcase lying by the bed and her first though is to go to him. Her first thought is to go to him and then she remembers the coldness of their house, the darkness she once lived in and fear replaces some of her happiness. Will it be different?

She looks back toward the mirror. It was once so simple, she thinks as she surveys her smudged cheeks, the redness of her nose. It was once so easy to look at him, look into his hazel eyes and know she loved him because of the feelings a simple glance, a simple touch of the hand would make so many emotions she’ll never be able to explain burst inside of her.

She sometimes wishes to be a child again, to be seventeen. She wishes to go back to a time when she never had to question her spontaneous thoughts. She wished to go back to a time when she didn’t have to question him. She once knew that she loved him. It was an innate feeling inside of her and she never had to wonder. It was only Lily and James, no other factors, no other people. But, she thinks as she wipes away the last of her tears, when did it become more than Lily and James?

She suddenly closes her eyes in pain. Gabriella, her beautiful daughter she loved more than life itself. Everything about Gabriella was precious from her little fingers to the arrogant glint in her gorgeous eyes. She was going to be a beauty, she knew that. Gabriella was already growing up with the looks of her handsome father, with a dash of her beautiful mother, and anyone who looked at her could see what she would have become. She used to call her Bella, Lily’s nickname for her from the cradle. Bella, because she couldn’t get over the beautiful olive coloring she inherited from James’s family. Couldn’t stop staring at the emerald eyes with more passion and personality than Lily's eyes ever had.

She blamed him for so long. She blindly blamed him for Gabriella’s death because she wanted to blame anyone but herself. Blamed him for all these years because he became her perfect scapegoat, the perfect vent for her grief. And she began to believe in his guilt because it was better than the night of the funeral when her thoughts were accusing herself. It was better than that night, a month later, when she sat in the bathroom and felt the in some way it had to have been her fault. It was an accident and for so long she has known that. She has known that he wouldn’t harm a hair on Gabriella’s head because James adored her. How he used to dote on his first born child. He loved Gabriella so much and Lily even had moments of jealousy (immature jealousy) because she had to share James’ heart. She was his clever Gabby, his witty little girl who would grow up to fascinate the world.

She looks away from the mirror and her eyes rest on her jewelry box. She opens it slowly and takes out the silver necklace with the lily charm on it. She looks in the mirror again and feels inside of her a need to put it on. She unclasps it, puts it around her neck, and clasps it again. She touches the lily and closes her eyes. She remembers the day by the lake when he gave this necklace to her, the intense glow in his eyes. Her eyes suddenly shoot open and she feels herself smiling through her thoughts of him. Feels herself wanting his arms to be around her.

She turns around and looks at this room of her childhood where she knows she doesn’t belong. This place isn’t home to her anymore. James is her home now. She doesn’t belong here. She goes to the closet and takes all the clothes she brought with her from London and puts them messily inside the suitcase. Forgetting to take the necklace off she rushes downstairs and sees her mother sitting in the living room drinking tea.

When her mother turns toward her Lily is surprised to see that she asks no questions. Surprised that she seems to know exactly what her daughter is about to do. All she does is get up and hug her, hug her little girl and let her go for a second time, let her wander off to that magical world she knows next to nothing about. She kisses Lily’s cheek gently and whispers good luck in her ear. Whispers _‘go get him’_ with a small, sad smile on her face looking at her beautiful daughter and knowing it’s only because of her love for James that she could glow that way. An instant later Lily disappears from her house with a loud crack.

When she gets to the house it’s quiet and empty. She walks up the stairs slowly and hears every creak each step makes. She stands outside their bedroom for a moment, surveying the white door and breathing deeply knowing there’s no going back on the path she came. Slowly with a shaky hand she turns the knob, opens the door, and walks inside.

The first thing she notices is the unmade bed. She puts her suitcase down and walks over to the bed as if to make it when a bottle of her best rum catches her eye. She walks over to it slowly and closes her eyes when she realizes he’s been drinking ever since she left. She closes her eyes she realizes that her leaving has made him as broken as she once was. She puts the bottle down, smells the crystal glass and makes a small face before looking on the desk and seeing a blank parchment on the table with the day’s date, _November 21, 1979,_ and realizes that this was the letter he was supposed to send her today. She smiles sadly, looks around at the disorder around her and sits on the bed in the exact spot she sat before and waits for him to return.

It takes him a few hours to come home. He went out with Sirius and drastically wished to go to the nearest pub when Sirius insisted that they hang out at his place instead. They spend the day at Sirius’s work, flying together on break-time, procrastinating when Sirius should have been working, and by the time he leaves to go home he feels not a bit better than he did at her house that morning.

He walks home, as he always does, because he always feels he never gets to that house slow enough. He never used to think that he was going home to anything. He thought it was merely a house, once joyous, now reeking the scent of a broken home and a depressive, alcoholic wife. He was a fool. He knows he was. He’s had her for so long but has just ignored it, ignored her and now, he thinks, now it’s too late. Now he has to go home to an empty house, sleep in an empty bed, and live an empty life he wishes he could run away from. He sighs when he reaches the front of his house and opens the door wishing that he had come home nice and drunk to soothe the pain of drinking from those crystal glasses that were a wedding present from his great Aunt Mildred.

He isn’t sure what he thought when he first saw her sitting there, but knew she had to be a trick of his mind, a figment of his imagination. He just stood there in the doorway of their bedroom and gaped at her sitting on their bed, a suitcase placed a few feet away. He knew, just knew that she couldn’t be real. A sweet voice snaps him out of his dream,

“Hello James.”� She says quietly looking at him. He stares at her.

“Lily?”� He asks, “What are you… why are you here?”� She smiles slightly.

“It’s my house too, is it not?”� She says and smiles wider at the confusion evident on his face.

“You left.”� Is all he says. She looks away.

“Do you not want me here?”� She asks looking into his eyes earnestly.

Something within him seems to snap and he suddenly processes everything.

“You’re here.”� He says with a quivering voice, “Oh God you’re here.”�

She stands up and walks over to him.

“I love you,”� She says looking into his eyes, “and I’m sorry for forgetting it.”� Tears slowly fall down her face and he lifts a hand and wipes them away.

“I love you, too.”� He says, “I love you so much.”� And he leans in and kisses her. Kisses her with all his dormant passion because it’s been too long since he’s tasted her lips, breathed in her mesmerizing scent. “I love you.”� he says one last time into her hair before she pulls him in for another kiss. They make love that night for the first time in over three years.

**A/N: Okay, one more chapter and then I’m done. I don’t know if I like this so much but it’s the only way I could think of doing it. I’m sorry to disappoint you all but this story will have a happy ending. So unlike me I know. But don’t forget to REVIEW!**


	11. Godric's Hollow

_Three months later…_

He wakes up to a sunny room after a deep sleep. It takes a while for his eyes to open and he can’t seem to suppress the smile warming up his face as he wakes up in a beautiful house perfectly content. He’s been on a permanent high for weeks now. He opens his eyes slowly, squinting for a few moments from the sunlight, and stretches his muscles to work out the after sleep cramps. Then he turns over, sees waves of red curls by his side, hears her light breathing he doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of, and smiles even wider as he wraps his arms around her thin body. He whispers good morning into her hair and kisses her head before closing his eyes again and just rests peacefully next to his wife.

It takes her a few moments to wake up and when she does she turns in the bed and snuggles more into him. It’s hard for her, for either of them, to be away from each other. Ever since they reconciled three months ago every moment possible was spent together because too many years were spent apart. 

“Good morning.”� She says. Her voice still heavy with sleep and her eyes still closed.

“Want breakfast?”� He asks her playing with strands of her deep red hair.

“Can I have anything?”� she asks him eyeing him playfully with bright eyes.

“Anything.”� He says smiling.

“I want pancakes then. With chocolate chips.”�

“Okay.”� He says and gets out of the bed.

He walks down the stairs of their new house. They’ve been living there for about two months. It’s a picturesque little village called Godric’s Hollow. It’s a nice place for children to grow up, so the real state dealer says. The house is beautiful. Not fancy like the mansions they grew up in or cold and modern looking like their town house in London. It has a very cozy feel. It feels like a place any person would like to call home.

They decided to move about a week after they got back together. They felt as if they needed a makeover, a way to start fresh so that they could leave behind the demons of their past. The house they used to live in was a part of their old life, a place of bad memories and heartbreaking moments. This place offers them a clean slate, a way to forget about the troubles they once dealt with.

Not that they could ever truly forget. It was the hardest day of her life when she walked into Gabriella’s room with big cardboard boxes. For so long that room was a shrine of her lost daughter and packing her things into boxes just cemented her death in a way the funeral, the three years without her, never did. Packing away her things felt so wrong. It felt as if Lily was letting Gabriella go. As if she was forgetting Gabriella. It was the first and last time since the reconciliation that she cried because as she folded the bed sheets, touched Gabriella’s stuffed bear Brownie, the memories overwhelmed her.

Her stuff is in boxes in the attic. They’ll never use it again. They won’t allow Gabriella’s old belongings to become hand me downs to their next child because it somehow would desecrate her memory. But it’s still there as a reminder of their lost daughter, the fascinating daughter who was too prefect, too amazing for this world to be able to keep her.

She goes up to the attic some days while James is at work. She’ll sit for a few hours looking at pictures or touching Gabriella’s old clothes. She still can’t bring herself to let her daughter go, to completely forget the pain that plagued her for years. But, it’s more bearable for her now, to live with the knowledge that her only child died because she isn’t alone. Before she lived in this dark world she inhabited by herself. She was left with her painful memories of a laughing child and a long fall to the ground from a broom she never wanted Gabriella to have. She was plagued with dreams about silky black hair and the know-it-all arrogance she thought more precious than anything else. She was alone in her grief, in her misery, because she shut the life out of her when she stood before her daughter’s uncovered grave.

She isn’t alone anymore. His mere presence makes everything so much more bearable. It was like before she forgot she had him, forgot she loved him. It was as if she was stuck in a dark dream for the past three years that he suddenly woke her from. He rescued her after three years of wanting. He rescued her long after she had already given up on him.

After about ten minutes she walks downstairs and meets him in the kitchen, the scent of pancakes filling her nose. She smiles when she enters the room, looks brightly at the back of his messy haired head and sits at their round kitchen table. Everything about this house, this life is new and fresh and… absolutely wonderful in a way she never dreamed was possible.

“Sirius is coming over later today.”� He says as he turns off the stove and piles the pancakes onto a plate. Her face falls slightly at that, but she still smiles and sighs happily.

“And what will you two kids get yourself into today?”� she asks.

“We thought we’d fly. You know how he fancies our backyard. Frank and Alice are coming over today as well if you remember. She’s pregnant now, did you know?”� he asks sitting in the seat next to her. She blushes and unconsciously touches her stomach. 

“I must have forgotten.”� She said. “I’ve had so much on my mind.”�

“Like what? Unpacking? Lily, Red, we’ve been done for weeks.”� She looks at him and smiles, knowing that he doesn’t know, that she shouldn’t keep this from him. But knowing our scary it would be to tell him the she may be, _is_ with child again.

It’s hard. The last pregnancy was met with high prospects and ended in failure. She’s afraid of same thing happening again, of giving her heart to this child growing inside of her and then suddenly its gone and she’s mourning for another baby. But then there’s that side of her that feel this time will be different. The side of her that knows, just knows, this is the beginning of the rest of their lives. The past three years, what was that anyhow? It was nothing, a sadistic joke, that’s all.

“When are our guests coming over?”�

“A few hours. Two I guess.”� She shakes her head.

“James, you prat. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”� she says her eyes filled with that old steam of her childhood.

“You were sleeping, honey. Besides, it’s refreshing for you to be angry with me.”�

She softens at that and laughs.

“You’ll always be a boy, won’t you James? You’ll always be like a child.”� She says looking past James and into their grand backyard, her hands still on her belly because she never wants to let it go.

_Two Hours Later_

They’re sitting in the backyard on a large cushioned chair. Her head leans on his shoulder and his arms are protectively wound around her body. A comfortable silence surrounds them.

“Frank and Alive should be here soon.”� Lily says quietly breaking through their silence.

He stays quiet for a little and then quietly speaks, “I know. I sort of wish they wouldn’t come.”� She looks up at him slightly,

“I think it’s great about Alice, you know? A baby. It’s marvelous, isn’t it?”� She asks him looking closely at his facial futures.

He tenses up a bit and looks sad, “Of course it’s marvelous. Any one would think so.”� He says smiling slightly and resting his shin on the top of her coppery head.

“You as well?”� She asks

He stays silent for a few moments before he speaks, “I can’t think of anything I would want more.”�

“That’s good because I need to tell you something.”� She mumbles out. “I think… No I know that well, I’m pregnant.”�

“You’re pregnant?”� he whispers to her his face temporarily frozen in shock as he stares over their large back yard. “We’re going to have a baby?”� he whispers more to himself than anyone else and for a moment she’s afraid that he won’t want this baby, that his fear is too great.

He just begins to smile all of a sudden. A huge, quirky smile breaks out on his face and she chuckles slightly as she thinks that he looks seventeen again, looks like he just won the Quidditch cup for Gryffindor.

“This is the best news.”� He says. “I’ve been hoping that maybe…”�

“Hey Potters”� A loud voice calls.

Of course it’s Sirius coming to interrupt their perfect moment. Of course next time they’re able to be alone in the kitchen just ten minutes later Frank and Alice arrive with a loud crack in their kitchen. Of course, _of course_ , they don’t have a chance to be alone together for the rest of the day too busy they are entertaining their guests: the guys flying while the girls speak about motherhood below. Of course, when they finally are alone, they fall right to sleep without a word but a quick _I love you_. But that’s life at Godric’s Hollow, free and alive. It was the fine print in their reconciliation: _no melancholy allowed in the walls of Godric’s Hollow._ It’s all part of their new life.

It truly was a fun day for them. Eating out by the lake in their backyard. Opening a bubbly apple cider to celebrate the pregnancies of Alice and Lily. Just them two, Lily and James, sitting close together and whispering in each other ears, acting as they did when they were children in the Gryffindor common room was enough to make the world seem… amazingly perfect.

She stares at her stomach a lot each day, likes to see how the baby is growing inside of her, likes to dream up different names to call the baby and the different clothes she’ll make it wear. She imagines their future, imagines standing with James and a eleven year old child at platform 9 ¾ and imagines a wedding in the distant future, a graduation from Hogwarts, head boy or girl maybe.

James loves touching her stomach. He plays her muggle radio near her saying he wants the baby to hear. She laughs before yelling at him to get the bloody ruckus away from her. He’s always doing those small things, like talking in gibberish to her belly, petting her as if she’s some dog, and she can’t stand it. He’s so bloody annoying and she… she loves him so much more for that.

It’s just the mere fact that they both love this child so much that makes all his antics okay. This baby slowly growing inside of her, their future child, saved their dying relationship and helped rekindle a love that was almost lost. This child is their rescuer. It gave Lily James and James Lily. It gave them life and for that they can never repay it. But they’ll spend their lives trying.

**END**

**I hope you enjoyed the story!**


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